Rebels and Traitors must seem like a new departure for me – though it’s really what I always wanted to write. Some of my friends have been hearing about this for nearly fifty years!

I was in my teens when I first started caring about the English Civil War, which has always appealed to my libertarian ideals, even though the attempt to install a republic failed and many of the great questions are still being fought over. To take one very pertinent issue, we are still debating what support should be given to soldiers who are injured in government service, and whether there should be a duty of care to the widows and children of those who are killed. The New Model Army felt passionately about that – mutinied over it even - and so do the forces who are serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this book, Civil War events are a crucial element of the story, along with the struggling Commonwealth that followed. It was the dawn of modern journalism, a key moment in publishing. ‘Ordinary’ people took up the struggle and felt able to act and speak on their own initiative in ways that had never happened before. Even civilians suffered horribly. I think that what happened between 1642 and 1658 was extraordinary and should be much better known.

In a welcome change from the first-person, single-viewpoint narratives of the Falco series, I was able to follow several characters. My hero, Gideon Jukes, fights for Parliament, associates with the Levellers, and attempts to stave off the demise of the Commonwealth by working for the intelligence service in the face of sometimes curious enemy plots. (What a relief to write about a man who is tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed too!) My heroines are primarily Juliana Carlill, who marries a professional soldier on the Royalist side and has to survive for years as a lone wife and mother while he is away fighting on both land and sea. The there is Kinchin, a scavenger for whom nobody is fighting, so she has to fend for herself at the raw end of society.

I wanted to extend my range here. There are some famous episodes, a scatter of battles, domestic and workplace scenes. There is theatre, law, surgery without anaesthetic, truly bad weather and religious nudity. A great deal of the action is poignant, but there are some jokes. Many of the most important scenes follow closely the words of people who were actually there – though I hope that the novel is absolutely my own. It is dear to my heart and I hope people will like it.