New Novel Exhibits ‘Grace’ Under Fire

By Michael Malone

“Scorched Grace,” a 2023 novel from Margot Douaihy, centers on Sister Holiday, a nun doing her thing down in New Orleans.

Sister Holiday is not a typical nun, because there is a good chance you would not read a novel about a typical nun. Before she was a nun, Holiday played guitar in a punk band. She has tattoos and a gold tooth she got after a bar fight. She’s a lesbian. She enjoys a cigarette and a cocktail.

A family tragedy, which happened as a result of Holiday’s irresponsible behavior, prompts her to join the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans. Some of the nuns are kindly and accepting. Some are not. She teaches guitar at a Catholic school. Some of the students dig her punk-rock trappings. Some do not.

“I came here because I wanted to make better decisions,” Douaihy writes. “If we can’t make our own choices, we’re nothing more than marionettes. And after six months of dedicated service at the convent, and six more teaching music, New Orleans finally felt like a real home.”

A fire is set at the school, resulting in serious damage and the death of a janitor. Other odd occurrences go down, and others die. Sister Holiday slips into sleuth mode to find out who is behind it all. Her being the punk-rock nun, she becomes a suspect in the crime spree, and identifying the malefactor will clear her name.

Whether the novel works or not rests entirely on whether Douaihy, a finalist for the author with the most vowels in their last name, can make Sister Holiday believable, as opposed to a half-baked collection of contrasts drawn up on a whiteboard. I read the first half of “Scorched Grace” with this dilemma in mind, and I think Douaihy pulls it off.

Sister Holiday feels real. She’s someone you might have a whiskey with in a dive bar. Douaihy mixes in Holiday flashbacks, where she goes back to her time in Brooklyn – her cop father, her religious mother, her bullied brother (he goes by Moose, she by Goose), her girlfriend and bandmate Nina – and it makes her more real.

“Growing up queer, ‘tolerated’ by my parents, forever worried about Moose falling apart, scared of Pop’s temper and Mom’s martyr melodrama, getting tossed out of our apartment – it all made me crave a different kind of family, a community of my own design,” she writes. “I appreciated being a Sister, belonging to our Order.”

I found Douaihy’s writing to be good, not great. Some of the banter between characters falls flat. As janitor Bernard hears a Bible verse about Judith beheading Holofernes, he quips, “Dude’s gonna need a Band-Aid. A big one.”

But she paints a compelling portrait of New Orleans, sultry and grimy and full of energy, and gives The Big Easy a minor character’s role.

“People traveled to the Crescent City to get lost, find love, hide out, reinvent themselves,” she writes. “I needed more. I needed to be reborn.”

From Scranton, Douaihy is a poet whose collections include “Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Star” and “Scranton Lace.” She does a bit of research into religion and being a nun for “Scorched Grace.” She deftly delivers a punk-rock nun without making fun of nuns or other super-serious Christians.

I enjoyed the unique overlap of religion and punk rock. I read the novel while in Cape Cod and, just after finishing it, was thinking of other examples of religion bumping into rock, outside of the Christian rock category, as we drove to Dairy Queen for Blizzards. Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” came on the car radio, with the line about seeing the doorway of a thousand churches in his loved one’s peepers.

“Scorched Grace” has its fans.

“Within five pages, I was in love with this novel,” said author Gillian Flynn.

“Vibrant, cracking and deliciously insubordinate,” said author Megan Abbott.

Another crime novelist, Don Winslow, called it “one of the best crime fiction debuts I’ve come across in a long while.”

A short review in The New York Times labeled “Scorched Grace” a “showstopper of a series debut.” The reviewer added, “I cannot wait to read the sister’s next investigation, of mysteries and of her own self.”

Indeed, a funky little whodunit develops in “Scorched Grace.” And as is always the case in the well-done mystery novels, the culprit is not who you might expect. The novel moves quickly and introduces a truly unique character. “Scorched Grace” is a debut with some promise.

Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.