The Black Lyon

The Black Lyon is a historical romance by the American writer Jude Deveraux, published in 1980. It is the first book in her Montgomery/Taggert sequence.

Ranulf is an English conqueror of Norman descent, known as the Black Lyon, and he is a man whom no woman has been able to win until he meets Lyonene, whose fiery spirit matches his own. Their romance is quick and their marriage is stormy, and Lyonene endures considerable danger in order to stay at his side. The plot against them begins with a web of vicious lies spread by a jealous woman, which drives Lyonene away from her home and from Ranulf and into a trap across the Irish Sea. The one man who can save her is the man she left, and the only way to save the marriage is to destroy the plot that was built to ruin it. The novel sets its story among the Normans and their castles, and it is the earliest of the long sequence of novels Deveraux wrote about the Montgomery and Taggert families.

Deveraux's Montgomery and Taggert books were written over several decades and in more than one historical period, and this one is the first of them by publication order.