Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy
The rundown: Sister Holiday is a devoted novitiate at the Sisters of the Sublime Blood convent and music teacher at one of the last private Christian schools in New Orleans. She also happens to be queer, tatted, and a chain-smoker who enjoys putting her amateur sleuthing skills to work. The community is stunned when Saint Sebastian’s School becomes the target of an unknown pyro, and Sister Holiday interjects herself into the investigation, unhappy with the direction law enforcement has taken it and determined to find the culprit responsible for disrupting her sanctuary.
The review: The joy of this whodunnit stems directly from Sister Holiday as a fresh addition to the murder mystery genre. Douaihy employs a queer lens to subvert genre conventions about who can be a hard-boiled detective, blowing all stereotypes - both of nuns and detectives - out of the water. As such, Sister Holiday’s character carries a hefty weight on her shoulders, and I wondered for the first third of the book whether Douaihy would succeed in making her more than the novelty of the characteristics that prompted me to pick up the book in the first place. Once we started learning more about Holiday as a person and the lurid past that is so frequently hinted at, however, I became invested in her character and thus the story. The plot, however, languishes in comparison. This is, in part, because it’s written to be a character-driven murder mystery, but, even acknowledging this fact, the main character is undoubtedly more compelling than the mystery. I am glad that I read it because Holiday’s character and the series (a planned trilogy) have a lot of potential. Readers should be aware that Holiday’s past is traumatic, and her memories of it can be tough to read.
Goes well with: Scorched Grace is unique in the crime fiction genre thanks to its protagonist. However, if what you enjoyed about this book is that it’s a sapphic, noir, murder mystery with religious overtones, then you might enjoy C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew The End. Full disclosure, though, this one’s a fantasy novella.
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