Review: "Scorched Grace" by Margot Douaihy

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy
Published February 2023 via Gillian Flynn Books
★★★

Sister Holiday is, if not an enigma, somewhat at odds with the general perception of what a nun should be: chain-smoking and heavily tattooed, queer and foul-mouthed and sarcastic, she's one of four nuns living in a tiny convent in the heart of New Orleans. The attached Catholic school makes up the rest of their stomping grounds—until there's a fire, and a death. And another fire, another death. Convinced that the police aren't up to the task, Sister Holiday takes it upon herself to solve the case.

I love the premise—cranktastic nun who loves god but sometimes regrets giving up drinking and drugs? Heavy snark that she cannot cover up the way she covers up her tattoos? Yes please. (Also, that cover.) But...the execution I don't love nearly so much. I think what we have here is a litfic-writer-slash-poet trying to write a fairly standard murder mystery with a chain-smoking twist, and what we're left with is a lot of the stench of New Orleans without a lot of reason to care about most (any) of the secondary characters. We're told that one Sister is sweet and another is sour and another is Sister Holiday's stand-in mother, but...I rarely felt any of that. I also low-key hate the how-bad-can-we-make-it backstory for Sister Holiday, which is not unusual for murder mysteries on the grimmer end of things but which feels gratuitous at best. (And—maybe a small point in the book, but at one point someone has a diabetic emergency...and the so-called 'responsible' adult shrieks that it's low blood sugar...and sends for insulin. That's not how it works! If his blood sugar is low, he needs sugar! Candy! Whatever! If his blood sugar is high, he needs insulin. Giving insulin to someone with low blood sugar will make the problem worse.)

It looks like this might be poised as the beginning of a series, but all I want for book two is for Sister Holiday to get some serious therapy. And I don't need to be there for that.