By Jennifer L. Johnson
In the fictitious Caldwell, New York, boots are called shitkickers, rhetorical questions end with “true” and every vampire is at least 6’5.
With "Lover Unleashed," the latest installment of the "Black Dagger Brotherhood" series by J. R. Ward, the author proves entirely incapable of crafting a male character that is any different from the ones she’s already written.
I suppose after penning eight books with similarly-speaking hard-assed vampire warriors that listen to hardcore rap and fight bad guys that smell like baby powder (I kid you not), the author may be a little too used to writing this kind of dialogue.
The "Black Dagger Brotherhood" series is rife with violence, dark humor, foul language and — for many of her characters — sexual proclivities that are nothing short of taboo. That a series that takes these risks would become popular enough to warrant a hardcover publication — the second for the series — is very unusual for the contemporary and paranormal romance genres.
Fans may have flocked to Ward’s saga for the noble yet aggressive characters, but it was the complex plotlines and narrative arcs that often developed into a single cohesive unit that kept readers eagerly anticipating the shocking climaxes that left them emotionally twisted and desperately seeking the resolution that would make it all OK.
That is, until this novel.
If you had even the slightest hope of understanding what was happening if you skipped one of Ward’s massive, meandering tomes, I would tell you not to read "Lover Unleashed."
Even though I’ve been a loyal reader since book one, I found it hard to jump back into the Brotherhood’s complex world and keep up with exactly what was happening. You know that the author doesn’t care about the casual reader when it takes her a full 100 pages to remind you how the main character was paralyzed in the final three pages of her last novel.
The main character of "Lover Unleashed" was only introduced to readers in the last book. Payne, twin sister to the Brother Vishous, has just crossed over from the Sanctuary, a heaven-like safe space for the deity of the Vampire race, to receive care for an injury that left her paralyzed. When Vishous’ mate Jane reaches into the human world to enlist the help of a former coworker, the mutual attraction of patient and doctor threaten the bond between Vishous and Jane, as a band of warriors enters the Brotherhood’s territory seeking revenge for the death of their leader, the twins’ father.
Though the three plotlines seem thick with strife, very little seems to happen in the novel's 500 pages, partly because the principle characters that Ward uses to carry the saga forward are so wooden. Payne is barely more than a stock character. Ward expends too much effort trying to make her speech antiquated with more ‘verily’s’ than you can shake a stick at, when instead the author should have spent more time developing Manuel “Manny” Manello, the incidental character she yanked out of book five and placed in a starring role as the wannabe-lover.
In a disappointingly lazy move, Manny’s language and thoughts are just as dark as any of the Brothers: “Candace was one of those Manhattan social types who was nothing but a pimp away from being a prostitute, and in a lot of ways, she was like any other wasp — ignore the nuisance and it’ll go land on something else. Or someone else, as it were.”
Ward could have easily given the celebrated surgeon his own, more appropriate vernacular. As someone who has read — enjoyed — each of her other books, it seems like she ran out of Brothers to speak the lines she wrote for them.
Though this book focuses a great deal on Vishous and Jane (who had their own 450-page novel earlier in the series), Ward ignores many of the Brotherhood characters that made the books as engrossing as every single one until Unleashed has been.
This was a mistake, true?
"Lover Unleashed" (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 9) by J. R. Ward
Hardcover, NAL, $27.95
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