THE NIGHTINGALE LEGACY

From big-selling Coulter, spicy historical romance mixed with a jarring note of sadomasochistic sexual violence. Coulter inserts more comedy into the second installment of her Legacy series (The Wyndham Legacy, 1993), but she still holds onto the touch of Regency rough trade that keeps her paperbacks flying off the shelves. She also sticks a toe onto Amanda Quick's territory with this tale of Caroline Derwent-Jones, a feisty orphan who marries dark, brooding Frederic North Nightingale, Viscount Chilton, and brings female laughter and sanity to his all-male Cornish household, Mount Hawke. The Nightingale ancestors were such mean misogynists that they stashed away all the portraits of female ancestors. Caroline, who will scrub the frames and restore the pictures to their rightful walls, meets North at an inn in Dorchester, where she is fleeing from the guardian who tried to rape her. With hands slick with her own blood, she coshed him with a table and took his son Owen as hostage. And so Caroline continues in the women-on-top tradition that Coulter exploited in The Wyndham Legacy: No reluctant virgin she, Caroline experiences none of the pain and discomfort of the Sherbrooke brides; starts an 18th-century shelter for unmarried pregnant women; outfits battered women and children with knives and guns; and has satin-lined leather wrist cuffs made for her marriage bed. It's the wave of the romantic future: Women as victims are out. She and North find the serial killer menacing the village of Goonbell, and Caroline discovers the tomb of King Arthur and uses the sword Excalibur to save her life. (Even King Arthur doesn't want women to be victims.) It's generally Coulter's successful mix: Along with comic names like Goonbell, there's a persistent, titillating sordidness.