Welcome to the commentary for Vanquished, the final book in the Crusade trilogy! If you haven’t snagged your copy yet click here to see your buying options and get yours so you can read along!

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Now, chapter two!

Nancy wrote all the Salamanca Hunter’s Manual entries for the series. I think she did an amazing job making them sound good and ancient.

Heather is the ultimate tragic character in this series. She’s also quite possibly the character that goes through the greatest transformation. Through her we get to see what it’s like to be a newly converted vampire. Her thought process is a lot more animalistic than any of our older vampires. We liked to think that was part of the shock of the transition.

By the time we get to this point in the series, the church has struck a deal with the vampires and officially ordered all vampire hunting teams to stand down. This kind of devil’s deal, partnering with evil and/or making deals with it and allowing it to exist for the sake of peace that is only illusory is exactly how Hitler got as far as he did in WWII. We used WWII as a template for creating this series. The ideas of appeasement, capitulation, and struggling bands of resistance fighters permeate the series. When good men stand aside and do nothing to stop the evil that is flourishing in their sight they as much as condone it. It was a lesson hard learned in humanity’s past and one I fear we will be learning and re-learning until the end of time.

The references in this chapter to internment camps that the vampires are placing humans into and their super soldier programs are also things patterned off of WWII.

When Nancy and I write together we often sprinkle other languages into our books. In the Wicked series there was a lot of French and for Crusade there is a lot of Spanish, and a tiny amount of a few other languages. We set Spain as one of the main locations for the series and several main characters are from Spain. Although I took 3 years of Spanish in high school, and a year of Russian in college, none of those lines are written by me. Nancy loves languages and also has fans and friends around the world who will proof our use of foreign languages. We do enjoy it, though, because we feel it adds even more flavor.