Interview with Author Debbie Viguié

 On Thursday we had a special episode of Fangs for the Fantasy, with an interview with Debbie Viguié, author of the Witch Hunt Series

Please check out our reviews of: The Last Grave and The Thirteenth Sacrifice

Upcoming Interview with Author Debbie Viguié

We are pleased to announced that on Thursday, March 21, at 6:30 pm EST, we will be interviewing the author of the Witch Hunt Series Debbie Viguié.  Please join us live.  For those who are unable to join us live, the podcast will be placed on the blog as usual when we are finished.

Please check out our reviews of: The Last Grave and The Thirteenth Sacrifice

The Last Grave (Witch Hunt #2) by Debbie Viguié

Samantha is trying to start a new life in San Francisco after her life in Boston and Salem collapsed after taking down the Dark Witch Coven there. Now is her chance to restart without magic, with a new room-mate, Jill, and a new police partner, Ed.

Until a murder has the hallmarks of magic all over it – starting with a truly impossible and incomprehensible cause of death. Samantha is again faced with an impossible choice – ignore her power and let more people die (and there may be even more at stake this time than in Boston) or again delve into her magical past and risk losing everything, again. Perhaps even herself.

Worse, her self-control is frayed. She’s using magic without meaning to and it’s getting worse, to an extent that’s beginning to make her dangerous to those around her.

One of the things I like about this book is how many characters are painted really quite deeply with relatively little information on them. We don’t see much about Samantha’s partner, Lance, but in the short moments we see of him, in the things we learn of him, I get a full picture of the character. Jill, her room mate, doesn’t go into a lot of detail about who she is and what she does, but, again we have a pretty strong picture of her

And this is really clear with Samantha with a picture of her that’s developing in my head that adds to her own narrative. From her own POV we can see the insecurity, the worry, the desperate attempt to leave magic behind, the fear of what it could do to her, how dark and dangerous it could make her. But we also see her willingness to do what must be done not only in the big scenes where she does use magic despite her fears – but in smaller scenes as well, like when she uses Jill as bait and lies to her about the danger. I like this sense that there is a ruthlessness to her, even a darkness that she refuses to acknowledge or connects entirely to her magic.

The case itself was confusing in all the best ways. Things were happening, things were escalating, but we’re not quite sure what, how they’re connected or why – which was all made even more tangled by the time shifts moving the plot line around. They mystery remained mysterious and there were a lot of twists back and forth, a lot of questions to answer and a lot of things going on to keep us engaged and involved. It wasn’t a book I stayed up all night to read, unable to put it down – but nor was I ever tempted to abandon it and nor was reading it ever a chore – I enjoyed it from start to finish.

In the end, I like a lot of the development and the story but in some ways this book feels like a tangent. She got away from her friends, but her calling Ed re-established that link and, of course, she still kept in touch with Anthony. She held her tenuous ties to Salem and, ultimately, ended up going back there. I can’t shake a small feeling that the book was a distraction, that the plot, the meta being established, is all in Salem so why did we zip over to San Francisco only to return again? Especially since the way this book ended invalidated so many of the personal relationships she forged in San Francisco. It felt almost like the book finished with a great big reset button. Despite that, I am glad that the events touched on in the first book haven’t been brushed into the irrelevant past and are still going to loom large in the coming story – and that we have meta plot that was begun in the very first book.

I really do like the imagery involved with Samantha’s repressed memories, the different years she’s buried, the things she had to deal with then and it adds to her ongoing representation of trauma. Her past isn’t just something that troubles her or upsets her – she is still haunted by it, by the memories, the flashbacks and the nightmares. They can be heavy at times but it’s a powerful depiction and a relief from so much of the genre where traumatic pasts and horrific childhoods are used for relatively empty characterisation without.

The 13th Sacrifice (Witch Hunt #1) By Debbie Viguié

 Samantha was a witch along with her mother, a dark witch in a powerful coven that practised the darkest of arts. Sacrifice and demons were not unknown in their pursuit of power – until she turned 12 and a horrific ritual went terribly wrong and the deeply traumatised Samantha was the only survivor.

She has a new life now. New parents, a new faith and a new job, as a cop no less. Her past is behind her. At least, she thought it was until a murdered young woman revealed a pattern of ritual murder victims. Dark witches were back in the area and, worse, they have ties to her old home, her old life and her old coven.

She is the only police officer who can possibly infiltrate and expose this new coven, the only person who can save countless possibly future lives – but doing so means facing the demons of her past and becoming everything she has fought so hard to avoid.

I liked this story a lot; it managed to draw me in very quickly and kept me hooked through the duration. We have some very compelling characters, a pretty original world and a plot that moves ideally.

I won’t say the plot is especially twisty; once we have an idea of what is going on after the first, say, third to half of the book, the rest is pretty guessable. I could see roughly what was happening and how the book would end once the reasons behind the murders had been unearthed – but that didn’t make the plot dull. I knew the end but getting there was still very interesting with its own revelations and explorations. I think if you’re going to write a book with an ending that is at least roughly known then it becomes important to keep the plot moving (otherwise you get the “get on with it!” sensation) and it’s important to put enough other elements in the book to keep it fascinating.

And this book succeeded on all counts. At no point did I feel the book was dragging things out; Samantha is very on target. Once the bodies are discovered she focuses on finding out how and why they died. Once that is discovered, she focuses on infiltrating and bringing down the coven. She doesn’t get sidetracked, she doesn’t twiddle her thumbs and she doesn’t curl up in a corner – she gets on with it and the book is always moving forwards

The book also had some really good twists along the way – the rage and hatred flaring up against witches turned out to be much more involved than I imagined. And we had Samantha herself confronting her buried demons of her past.

I think this book served as an excellent introduction book. The plot was good but also served as an excellent frame work on which the world could be built with it’s interesting, involved and well researched magic system and the complex protagonist could be introduced and show cased all without excessive info dumping

I did like the portrayal of Samantha’s trauma in this book. This is always shaky ground because Urban Fantasy is so full of dead or absent parents, horrific childhoods, abuse, torture etc  etc  etc – in fact, an Urban Fantasy protagonist with living parents and a happy childhood is really really rare; so I did look at another example with a lot of skepticism. But as far as this overused trope went, it was well done. The trauma fit the story and the character, it wasn’t an unnecessary addition just for the sake of it to provide quick and easy “development”. It was an integral part of what she was, the path she’d taken and the character she’d become.