Book Review: Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy
By Doreen Sheridan
March 10, 2023
Sister Holiday is no one’s idea of the perfect nun. Queer, with bleached hair and tattoos over most of her body – not to mention topless photos from her days in a punk rock band easily accessible on the Internet – her desire to take holy orders was a tough sell to nearly every convent in America. When the Sisters of the Sublime Blood finally agreed to take her in, Holiday was more than thrilled to move away from her Brooklyn home in order to join their ranks in New Orleans.
Not that those ranks are exactly flourishing nowadays. Though the sisters are part of a progressive, teaching Order, applicants are few and far between, such that the only other nuns there besides Holiday are the aged Sisters Augustine, Therese and Honor. Sister Augustine is their Mother Superior and the principal of Saint Sebastian’s, the private Catholic school where they all teach. Holiday is the music teacher, and one who brooks no nonsense from her charges, as she harbors the following philosophy:
I offered my students the only thing that mattered in life–honesty–and I’d serve it the way I meted out revenge, ice cold. I was a fuckup about most things, but when it came to commitment, I was all in, like a python eating a goat, sinew and toenails and skeleton and all.
So despite seeming an unlikely candidate for nunhood, Holiday is indeed devoted, both to Christ and to her kids. She’s not a total rule follower though, often indulging in sneaky smoke breaks with contraband confiscated from said students. It’s while on one of these one evening that she’s startled by an explosion from the school, followed by the fiery plummet of one of the maintenance crew from an upstairs window. Hearing voices calling out from inside the conflagration, she runs into the burning building to find two of her students injured and trapped in another room. She helps get them out, and almost immediately begins trying to figure out what happened.
When other fires begin targeting the school and the surrounding community, it becomes very clear that this was not an accident. With the fire marshall and the police seeming to move as slowly as molasses in putting a stop to the spate of deadly arsons, Holiday must endeavor to solve the crimes herself, even as everyone else is telling her to butt out. But Holiday feels like she was divinely inspired to investigate almost from the moment she laid eyes on the flames:
When the adrenaline burned off, I felt it, the battle–angels, devils, I saw Death and survived the flames twice now. No need to read the Bible to learn how the elements torment and sustain us. Fire, anger, water, redemption. What plot twist sparked it, the arson? I’d figure it out, eventually, or die trying. Sleuthing and stubbornness were my gifts from God, tools They knew I could use. Yes, my God is a They, too powerful for one person or one gender or any category mere mortals could ever understand. That day, God and the Holy Ghost opened the door, and I ran into the flames to help the boys. We were in the fire, inside its red-purple grip, the rhythmic walls of a beating organ. But it was equally obvious, laying there on that gurney [afterwards], half blind, half alive, that no person nor saint nor psalm would save me. I’d have to do it myself.
As Holiday gets closer to the truth, she’ll find the shades of her own past – the very ones she’s been trying to outrun – coming back to haunt her. She’s had to work hard all her life to reconcile the many different strands of her belief. Will her discovery of a killer’s identity be the thing that finally breaks her faith in the power of good?
Scorched Grace marks the ferocious prose debut of Margot Douaihy, who introduces us to perhaps the most unique heroine in the history of the hard-boiled mystery genre. Sister Holiday is both devout and profane, caring deeply about her God and her faith and her mission, even if she doesn’t have much patience for the trappings of orthodoxy and tradition. I’m really interested in seeing where the rest of the series goes, in this first offering from Gillian Flynn’s publishing imprint.
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