Margot Douaihy – Scorched Grace (2023)

Preamble

As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I review on the theme. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover detective films and TV series too! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Or you can take a look at my collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!

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Review

I put Sister Holiday on my Five Books list of female detectives. So is the three stars here a mistake? Surely, Dominique, it’s better than that, to have been put on a Five Books list? Well, I’ve had to separate character and novel! Although this book is a middling (perhaps schlocky) entry into the female detective genre, there is a real prospect for Sister Holiday as an amateur detective, and I’ll definitely be reading others in the series to see how she develops.

There are a few grumbles I have about Scorched Grace that contributes to its three-star rating. I prefer character exposition to be stretched across the book and not in a chunky lump in Chapter 1. This first outing for Sister Holiday has a bit of an air of a pandemic novel, like Alex Michaelides’ The Maidens (although I’m not sure Scorched Grace gets to claim that status or benefit of the doubt in 2023). There is an unfinished quality to Grace, as though Douaihy has only done a first pass at connecting her plot points and was planning to come back to refine and revise the connective tissue. Holiday has managed to build an evidence board, apparently, in only a few hours after the commission of the crime while largely locked out of the building where the board is supposed to be. Things don’t quite connect. We leap into, for example, one character’s drug addiction. It’s not strictly irrelevant (although it’s important to future set-up, presumably), but it’s played as a trope here. It would have been better revealed in a subsequent novel.

Scorched Grace is also another one of those crime novels that uses sexual and reproductive violence as a spur, like the last novel I reviewed, but this feels on the gratuitous end, unlike La marea. Again, it feels like Douaihy is rushing. She wants us to know about the violent, vile abuse that queer kids can be forced to suffer, and its consequences for them and their families, and that those sorts of events can leave people with the sorts of control issues that might leave them inclined to strive to solve crimes in their community themselves, rather than trusting authority figures. But the inciting incident that apparently left Holiday with a sense of her own excellent “sleuthing” abilities is a quickly told tale of vengeance with very little detective work involved.

The novel is obsessed with the word “sleuthing”, an activity that needs to be shown rather than told, but largely isn’t here. This is not just a feature of its importance to the main character’s personal sense of identity, as other characters use it too in dialogue, suggesting it is an authorial tic, spending a lot of time asserting the main character’s identity as a sleuth because she’s yet to demonstrate it. At one point, Holiday describes her own “queer sleuthing skills”. This is a phrase more appropriate to academic or critical analysis than a main character’s internal dialogue in a first outing, and it suggests what many of us will suspect: Douaihy’s engineering of a crime novel overpowers her storytelling. Does Holiday really do any sleuthing? She does some snooping and trespassing, but she doesn’t really put anything together. To solve the case, she notices a burn on someone’s arm. It is hardly a triumph of detective work. Many detectives, including the great Sherlock Holmes, actually do fairly banal detecting in their stories; it’s the nature of the genre. Perhaps because Holiday has to be her own Watson, singing her own praises, the characterisation feels more forced than usual.

What is interesting about Holiday is the wrangling between identities that is a vital part of any detective character. She has an interesting backstory (although her connection with fire feels unnecessary!). Outsider status always benefits an amateur detective, and she is an outsider for all sorts of reasons. She is not the first ‘non-traditional’ nun, by any means—think Sister Act’s fantastic Sister Mary Clarence, Sister Boniface’s forensic skills, or House‘s nun with the skunk tattoo—but she can definitely make an interesting contribution to the genre if Douaihy can control her academic impulses and focus on storytelling rather than engineering.

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If you like cosy mysteries and short fiction, take a look at my collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!