Book Review: Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy

After the traumatic events chronicled in Margot Douaihy’s debut novel Scorched Grace, our heroine Sister Holiday is settling back into her life as the youngest servant with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans. Only six months away from taking permanent vows, she and Sister Honor – the only other nun in her convent and by default the Acting Mother Superior – rattle around Saint Sebastian’s, getting on each other’s nerves. Sister Holiday, at least, has plenty of things to keep her busy:

Besides being a nun, I was a music teacher at Saint Sebastian’s, a part-time private eye, and a full-time pain in the ass for PI Magnolia Riveaux, the hellcat who ran Redemption Detective Agency[.] She could have been my blood sister with the ways we protected and irritated and appreciated and disappointed each other. Riveaux was the brains, I was the bear trap. Metal teeth and all. One I latched on, you’d have to gnaw off your own leg to get rid of me. But we understood each other. Not that we were always sunshine and unicorns. More like hailstorms and cobras.

Sister Holiday might be lukewarm about getting along with other people, but she’s wholly enthusiastic about apprenticing as a PI under Riveaux’s tutelage. When they’re contacted by a vengeful wife looking for dirt on her cheating spouse, they’re thrilled to go out on their very first case, meeting their new client at Pier 11 on the waterfront. They’re thus shocked to find, instead of an unhappy spouse, the mutilated corpse of the priest who tends to St. Sebastian’s.

Father Reese had not been Sister Holiday’s favorite person, but even he deserved better than to be murdered and dumped into the Mississippi River’s rising waters. Things get murkier when Sister Holiday returns to the convent and discovers that their newest priest, Father Nathan, has also disappeared. Was he taken and harmed as well, or is something even more sinister afoot?

Could he have been the victim of a hate crime? Bigots despise progress. And those bastards would be especially offended by Father Nathan, a leader, a Black man rising through the ranks, maybe steering an old ship in a new direction. I was getting ahead of myself. A workplace hazard as a PI apprentice nun.

 

He didn’t seem upset yesterday. But everyone was masking something–what was his secret

 

Did our new priest murder the old priest, then flee? It was as far-fetched as any grainy mystery on PBS, but it’s a stunning miracle we can trust anyone. We don’t tell ourselves core truths, let alone one another. People we are closest to will tell the biggest lies. Trust is the greatest suspension of disbelief. I should know.

As the rains pour down on the city, Sister Holiday and Riveaux will have to navigate flooded streets and a tangled web of deceit in order to figure out what happened to St. Sebastian’s priests, in a desperate race to save the lives of the innocent. But what will they do when their own lives are on the line, in the face of massive institutional wrongdoing?

Douaihy does another exceptional job of examining the meaning of faith in the life of perhaps the world’s unlikeliest nun. Sister Holiday struggles not only with the concept of justice, both earthly and divine, but also with her own personal desires as a lesbian and addict. Her difficult relationships with her family and loved ones certainly don’t help, as a figure from her past unexpectedly shows up to force her to reckon with it. 

The author’s background as a poet is readily apparent not only in the occasional exquisite turn of phrase, but also in the oft-repeated imagery of water as both cleanser and curse. I do feel that the prose does occasionally stagger from one set piece to the next with little interest in the connective tissue of other people’s observed reactions, but this is of a piece with the narrator’s general absorption in her own thoughts and feelings. Perhaps Sister Holiday’s powers of observation will improve with her detecting skills as the series progresses. These books are certainly a necessary critique of entrenched power, as well as a reminder of the power of love and faith even when up against overwhelming odds.