Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (2023) is a mystery that intrigued me for the unlikeliness of its primary amateur sleuth–Sister Holiday, guitar teacher at St. Sebastian’s School in New Orleans. Sister Holiday is the former Holiday Walsh, the queer (but not practicing), tattooed, former punk rocker and addict, who joined the Sisters of the Sublime Blood after a terrible tragedy.
She becomes an unwitting witness to a murder when she’s sneaking a cigarette in a hidden courtyard and sees one of the parish maintenance men, on fire, plummet to his death from a second-story window. She rushes in to the building after hearing screams for help and is able to save two students from the fire.
Someone has shattered the peace of her newly-found community, and she can’t help herself but find out who it is. But the fires keep happening, and it seems like someone is trying to frame her?
Slowly building to its climax, Scorched Grace is a satisfying mystery, told from the perspective of a truly interesting character. Douaihy used the climate and setting of New Orleans to maximum advantage–I could feel myself start to sweat from the humidity she described.
It was mostly free from anti-fatness with an exception or two. I listened on audiobook, and I do recall a description of one of the other nuns in the convent–the one that Sister Holiday did not get along with–that was anti-fat. So I can’t consider it completely weight-neutral. But otherwise I’d recommend it.
Reading While Fat 