Dark Lover

Dark Lover is a novel by the American writer J. R. Ward, published in 2005 and the first book of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series.

Wrath has been fighting the lessers since they murdered his parents centuries earlier, and the novel gives him a reason to keep going that has nothing to do with the war: the daughter of his dead friend has to be brought through a transition she does not know is coming, and he is the only person who can do it. The brotherhood around him is introduced as a household as much as a military unit, with its own house, its own money and its own rules about who is permitted to know anything, which is how the series was able to carry so many characters after this book. Ward writes the romance and the violence in the same register, and the result established a pattern that a large part of the paranormal romance market has followed since. It is the first of a long sequence of novels about the same brotherhood, and it was an immediate commercial success.