The title, synopsis and cover had me instantly intrigued. Who can resist a tattooed, chainsmoking, swearing nun solving crimes? It starts well then begins to run out of steam and doesn't live up to the promise. Sadly it didn't work for me. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

A nun is a nun is a nun, no matter how punk rock lesbian she is, no matter if she smokes and drinks and swears.

Sister Holiday is, at first glance, the most unlikely practising Sister. Heavily tattooed, a heavy smoker and hiding her past relationships with women from the other Sisters of the Sublime Blood, she feels a pressure to prove herself and fit in. When she witnesses a fire set deliberately at their school and the death of a member of staff, she immediately sets about investigating what happened. However, as one of the only witnesses, with no alibi and after finding one of her standard issue blouses in her classroom bin with burnt sleeves, she soon finds that she has no choice but to crack the case in order to clear her own name. After the initial irritation and despite many protests, Sister Holiday unofficially teams up with Riveaux, the fire investigator from the New Orleans Fire Department and they begin to work through the arson case.

What I loved about Scorched Grace was the sense of humour running throughout the story. The crimes that take place in the book and the topics covered could have gone too heavy, but the sarcasm and amusing interactions between the characters kept it much lighter.

There was a subtle level of crime in this book. There were deaths involved but they weren't massively violent as it was made to look like the victims could have been accidental deaths rather than murder with a fire to distract from what was really happening. Because of this there wasn't a lot of gory detail involved and allowed the main focus to be on Sister Holiday. As she works through the clues and evidence, flashbacks are used to give glimpses of her life before joining the Sisterhood and an idea evolves about her need to solve the mystery and the reasoning behind that.

The fantastic and strange juxtaposition of Sister Holiday's faith and place in the church, compared with her past which was filled with alcohol, drugs, tattoos and punk music is what made Scorched Grace so special. She is such a unique character and I can see plenty of scope here for Sister Holiday to continue her investigations in future sequels.

The fierce protagonist of this story brilliantly catapults this novel into a league of its own in the crime genre. Sister Holiday is the embodiment of institutional rejection, whether that be the way she looks, the habits she indulges in, and the sexual relationships she’s has formed, she is an unlikely member of the Convent. Partnered with a evocative use of setting, the scene is set to unfold our protagonist’s shot at playing detective after witnessing an act of arson, and an unfortunate death as a result.

The pace catches itself to move with great speed, with Sister Holiday proving herself to be of great irritation to the other investigators of the fire that swept through school. When a second fire is started and another life is taken, this unlikely Sister is determined to catch who is responsible before they strike again. Whilst she stands as an image reversed to those who serve the school alongside her, her faith is strong and her desire to reinvent herself stronger.

The novel is unconventional and yet satisfies the wants of a classic whodunnit. I am definitely looking forward to seeing where Sister Holiday’s story takes us next. Whilst reading this book, I would have to say playing the Spotify playlist: Bad Reputation and Bad B Vibes, fits quite nicely!

Scorched Grace is definitely not your average mystery book, Sister Holiday is a great character with so much depth. She really is tenacious and a tattooed badass which you wouldn’t expect from a Sister. Unfortunately I don’t feel like as so much thought was given to the side characters as they didn’t feel as fleshed out.

The plot isn’t what held my interest in this book, there were so many flashbacks that it felt like the crimes were sometimes sidelined. I did enjoy the ending of this book as throughout we had quite a few suspects but not once did I guess right.

I’m really hoping that this was laying all the groundwork for the upcoming series as I would absolutely love to follow Sister Holiday sleuthing again.

Meet Sister Holiday. Complex, flawed, and well… a nun!

“Sleuthing and stubbornness were my gifts from God, tools They knew I could use.”

Set in New Orleans, which becomes a character of its own, lending its heat and oppressiveness to the story so well, appearances can be deceiving.

She’s definitely not your typical sleuth, but she’s determined, obsessed even, with finding out who desecrated her new home, her school and instilled fear into her Order.

Heavily tattooed, part of a punk band, queer and rebellious, she couldn’t be further from what one would imagine a nun’s background be like. But that’s the beauty behind those words, no bias, even with shame and secrets, you can find a home and a sense of belonging.

Anti-hero, sometimes unlikeable, Sister Holiday has a dark past and a short temper. Always pushing the limits, but as you get to know her, you get to understand why she chose a path of penance, and why the vengeful hunt is part of her core. But despite all of this, her heart isn’t as black as one might think.

Cleverly written, unconventional and entertaining, this book sets to break the boundaries of the genre and Douaihy has started a very interesting series here!

Foul mouthed, wise cracking, chain smoking, tattooed and Queer. Sister Holiday is not your average nun!

Set in New Orleans, in a Catholic convent, where Sister Holiday teaches at the private school after escaping her previous life in New York. A series of fires at the convent turns this into a murder mystery and who better to solve the crimes and find the culprit than Sister Holiday! This is a lot of fun, and a wild ride.

Rating: 3 - 3.5 ⭐

Thank you to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for this ARC! This review was voluntarily written by me.

It is not easy for me to write and rate this story because I need to consider a lot of things. In my opinion, this story is a character-driven story, thus it really needs an interesting character to make a reader go through the story. For me, I am not sure whether I am interested enough in Sister Holiday but she is still a compelling character. She has her own turbulent past stories and her experiences shape her present self and affect her investigation process which can be seen from the flashbacks. I’m attracted to this book because of the crime, maybe because I rarely (or may never) read novels that feature arson and the location where the crime happened (like why at school? That’s a place for learning!). The investigation process is okay for me even though I have a feeling that evidence is used as a manipulation tool, but I’m not sure. I do think that the flashbacks telling is a bit disproportionately balanced with the sleuthing but that may be just my feeling. I actually can't guess who is the culprit until the end but I do not know what to think of them. I do understand a little bit of their motive but I cannot fathom the manipulation they have done and their reasoning behind it although I do pity them a little bit. Lastly, I’m intrigued at the ending like, what will happen next?

With a nun more likely to utter expletives than pray to the Lord, who prefers chain-smoking cigarettes in a back alley to attending her Catholic school’s staff meetings, who formerly was a queer punk rock-playing guitarist with tattoos all over her body (make no mistake, she is still extremely queer and the tats are also still there), now a black-clad Sister living and working in a convent in New Orleans, and only slightly addicted to sleuthing and solving crimes, Scorched Grace had all the makings of an unputdownable whodunnit. After all, who can resist such an exciting premise? But when I had finished the novel, all I was left with was a feeling of “well, that was weird, and not the good kind of weird.”

After a horrendous fire breaks out on the grounds of Saint Sebastian School, Sister Holiday, a self-appointed amateur sleuth, takes it upon herself to find the culprit. After all, they didn’t only burn down the whole east wing, but with two students seriously wounded and one of the janitors left for dead, the attacker must be stopped. Even more so when Sister Holiday has to concede that the police are helpless, and the fires are spreading…

For all that it was promoted as “a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end”, I couldn’t stand just how little sleuthing Sister Holiday was actually doing. The book opens with how “[t]he devil isn’t in the details. Evil thrives in blind spots. In absence, negative space, like the haze of a sleight-of-hand trick”, only for us to 1) learn that Sister Holiday (kick-ass name, btw) learnt all her sleuthing techniques from watching crime dramas on TV and 2) to see that her “sleuthing” consisted of nothing but repeatedly asking suspects where they were the night of the fire(s) and getting no answers, finding clues that either the police had already found or that ended up not contributing to the investigation in a way that mattered, and returning to the scene of the crime several times only to find nothing.
All in all, I think I prefer a sleuthing character who is either a proper detective/private investigator or a person who acts based on nothing but curiosity and wit, such as the characters from Richard Oseman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” or Robert Thorogood's “The Marlow Murder Club”.

Now, while I thought the supporting cast of characters was relatively flat – at the end of the novel, we literally have the villain give their James Bond-esque monologue of “I’m-the-super-bad-villain-who-fooled-you-all-so-I’ll-now-reveal-my-very-intricate-and-complex-master-plan” – I thought that the scorching-hot setting of New Orleans in the summer almost made for a character in its own right. Douaihy never fails to stress and impress upon her readers the brutality of the heat, making it clear from the first page that this city’s environment is not to be trifled with.

“The air was thicky and gritty, like it wanted to bare-knuckle fight. Sticky heat, typical in New Orleans, but worse that day. The sun, the swollen red of a mosquito bite. Slow simmer belying the violence of the boil.”

Consequently, every one of these characters is sweating profusely. All the time. While some reviewers mentioned they were peeved about the author’s regular descriptions of bodily fluids and odour, I couldn’t have been less bothered. I think that in YA, fantasy, and modern fiction anyway, if they don’t happen to be involved with sex, bodies are written and described as way too sanitised. Kudos to Douaihy for writing characters that have annoying, but very human and biologically natural reactions.

Writing about the city and the heat is one thing, the writing style in general a whole other thing. On her website, the author states that “[r]aw, visceral, lush, obsessed – [her] lines are crafted to inject immediacy while simultaneously masking slow boils.” This certainly holds true for this novel, the immediacy of the narrative style showing in Sister Holiday’s constant stream of consciousness, which jumps around, leaving you at once disjointed, disorientated, and displaced. There is an urgency to the way her character thinks and feels, but where it’s almost too much in one place, it lacks in another. Never did I feel like the plot, or our “sleuthing” Sister, was progressing with the urgency I felt the case required. All the while, I continued feeling oppressed by the writing style that at times felt so heavy, I felt I couldn’t breathe.

Heavy are also the topics discussed – and sometimes instantly dropped again – in this novel. There are trigger warnings in abundance, most notably: queer trauma and abuse. Reading about these topics doesn’t trigger me but this is where I like to say that Trauma. Doesn’t. Make. Character. I don’t care what you put your characters through, I’ll read it. But give me a reason why you put them through excruciating pain laden with homophobic acts of violence resulting in life-long trauma. I need to see why. I won’t give a damn about your character only because you are telling me what horrible things they went through. Turn their trauma into something that propels the story or someone’s character development forward. Give me a reason to feel angry about it happening to them in the first place instead of just being angry about the act of rape, abuse, and violence itself.

This novel’s set-up sounded so fierce, and the title is undoubtedly a banger, it is so spot-on!, but the execution of the whodunnit mystery left me cold. In the end, I didn’t very much care to find out who the culprit was. I loved the idea of the protagonist, of her being a lesbian nun who is so devotedly, so unironically religious, and a believer even though her Sisters and Brothers condemn, abuse, terrorise, and demonise queer people like her. This dichotomy is what I would have loved to read more about instead of a rather trying and tiring whodunnit which, in essence, plays out like your average ITV crime drama, with stereotypical red herrings and archetypal villain behaviour.

Sister Holiday is an intriguing character and I enjoyed her. The mystery is a bit weak and the story didn't keep my attention.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

If this book is anything, it’s absolutely unique with a colourful yet dark New Orleans setting and a bad ass, punk, queer nun/super sleuth as our protagonist.

However, as with most whodunnits, there was a LOT of characters which I found a
real struggle. And as excellent a character as Sister Holiday is, unfortunately this story just didn’t grab me. At the end of the day, I think this is all down to personal preference. If you love a wee whodunnit with a difference I absolutely recommend picking this up. This just wasn’t my cup of Sister Honours special brew.

I was very excited and intrigued by the premise of this book and it starred out well for me I did get in to it initially. I felt that it became quite slow and didn't pack a punch for me. It wasn't for me but I can see that others may feel differently.

A slow read. But I mainly enjoyed it but there we some parts that didn't meant sense even with the two time lines of the sisters life.

Sister Holiday is a teacher at Saint Sebastian's School and a Nun In Training. When she is having a relaxing smoke down the alley beside the school one Sunday evening she realises the place has caught fire. She becomes determined to find out who is behind it as the arson attacks seem to persist.

The idea of a queer, punk, tattoo covered nun solving mysteries sounds so fun but I just think the whole thing was lacklustre. Sister Holiday keeps reminding us she's a sleuth but is uhhhh quite bad at it!

I know this is the start of a series so I think we lost some of the mystery in laying the groundwork.

A tattooed lesbian punk nun, solving crimes in the sweaty heat of New Orleans? Sign me up!

Well, I mainly enjoyed it, but was left feeling a little unsatisfied. Sister Holiday's reasons for becoming a nun were unconvincing to me and there were some parts which just didn't make sense - injecting a hypoglycaemic character with insulin would make them worse, not better! Characters often acted in inexplicable ways and a cute cat died for no good reason.

I don't regret reading this because I enjoyed the premise and the setting, but I don't think I'd pick up any more Sister Holiday stories if this became a series.

Holiday Walsh is the last person you would expect to become a nun. She is a tattooed, chain smoking, lesbian, who played guitar in a punk rock band. She was in a relationship with Nina another member of the band until Nina married Nicholas. So why did Holiday run off to New Orleans and join the Sisters of the Sublime Blood? She also teaches music at Saint Sebastian’s Catholic School. There are three other nuns along with Holiday, Sister Augustine (the mother superior) Sister Therese, and Sister Honor who doesn’t like Holiday and makes it clear every time she sees her.

The story is told in two different timelines, the past as readers learn what Holiday is running from, she wants to be forgiven her past sins, gradually we learn what she has done and the guilt she feels. The rest is in the present day, Holiday is in her favourite hiding spot the alleyway having a crafty cigarette, when she she sees red and orange in the sky, she then realises that the east wing of the school is on fire, seconds later a body comes crashing down from the second floor window, as she runs over to the body she realises it is Jack Corolla one of Saint Sebastian’s janitors, someone she got on with. But how did he come out of the window? Did he fall or was he pushed?

Holiday hears a cry coming from inside the building which should have been locked an hour earlier, as she enters to investigate she finds two of the pupils Jamie LaRose has a piece of glass at the top of his thigh and he is losing a lot of blood, and Lamont Fournet thinks he has broken his ankle. Holiday tries to hold both boys at once but she doesn’t have the strength. All three have inhaled smoke. But this is the first of a number of fires and it’s not long before Holiday realises that someone is setting her up as a scapegoat as she finds bits of her belongings appear near each site where the fire was lit. She is determined to get to the bottom of this and find out who is setting her up.

Holiday is a strong sassy character, determined to do her own investigations to prove she is innocent. This book focussed more on Holidays past than it did on the fires and murders. As this is book one of a possible series the author is letting the reader know more about the protagonists background and setting things up for the next book. The crimes do get solved with a few little twists.

I liked the character Holiday, I wasn’t so keen of some of the other characters but maybe as the series builds, the characters will develop more. Why does Sister Honor dislike Holiday so much,]? Is she judging her by her appearance with lots of tattoos adorning her body?. Is it because she had a life before joining the convent? Whereas Sister Honor went straight to the convent? Maybe those answers will come later.

The pace isn’t that fast, although there is always something happening, normally Holiday going along with the fire investigator Magnolia Riveaux, who it turns out has some of her own demons to sort out. An interesting introduction to Sister Holiday.

I would like to thank #Netgalley and @PushkinPress for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest, fair and unbiased review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book has a pretty unique premise with a super unique protagonist, but I'm not sure about the whole stream of consciousness shebang, and the mystery bit felt rather lukewarm and random by comparison.

“Holy Mary mother of God, let the afterlife have central air and hot women.”

Sister Holiday, a lesbian punk rocker turned nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test when a serial arsonist strikes the school she teaches at and lives are lost in this debut novel by Margot Douaihy.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh take on the adult crime genre. However, while it was a crime novel at heart, the thing I found most compelling was Sister Holiday’s characterisation. Douaihy revealed her backstory at an excellent pace, maintaining my interest the whole way through. The flashbacks were well integrated and didn’t detract from the story. The description of the setting was evocative. Furthermore, the plot thickened as the story progressed, which built suspense.

I have a few minor quibbles. Firstly, I found it unrealistic how Sister Holiday managed to find evidence that the police had missed within seconds of arriving on the scene. It felt like her reactions to events were a little disproportionate at times too. Unfortunately, I also found the big reveal easily predictable.

That said, I always looked forward to sitting down with this book. I definitely recommend it!

Trigger/content warnings (TW/CW): organised religion (Catholicism), wound detail, blood, death, murder, arson, fire, alcohol consumption, drug use, animal death, mention of suicide by hanging, brief scene where a character talks another down from self-immolation, rape including gang rape, abuse, homophobia, homophobic slurs, character who is kicked out because of his sexuality, sec scenes (not overly explicit, but present nonetheless), cheating, passing mention of conversion therapy, passing mention of school shooting, passing mention of self-harm, passing mention of therapy

After an arson at a Catholic school, one of the sisters, Sister Holiday, decides to investigate to get justice for her school.

This mystery didn’t draw me in like I thought it would unfortunately.

DNF@ 54%

I really tried with this book. The premise was very unique. A tattooed, chain smoking, queer ex-punk rock nun solves a mystery at her Catholic school. Her dark past is shown in flashbacks and she's clearly not your typical definition of a nun. Sister Holiday's character was something I wanted to read more about and we are told about her tragic backstory in bits and pieces, and what ultimately led her to become a nun teaching music at a school in New Orleans. Sadly, the writing made me lose interest in the weak plot and nonsensical police investigation. The arson investigator Rivaeux who was clearly meant to be Holiday's romantic interest also came across as bland. The plot and writing are very stilted and janky, the sentence structure is simplistic and events move in the A to B way which doesn't really make you invested in the story.

Apparently, this is the start of a sleuthing series, so hopefully, the sequels are better written than this one. Though I do seem to be in the minority in my opinion.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.