mikerickson reviewed Scorched Grace by Margaret Douaihy (Sister Holiday Mysteries, #1)
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3 stars
I know what this book was trying to do. And I know it didn't do it particularly well. But I know that I enjoyed it anyway.
The only mystery novels I really have experience with are Agatha Christie's (who sets a high bar) and old noirs from the 40's and 50's (which is a fairly distinct style). What we have here is a burnt-out punk rocker-turned-nun protagonist with a reputation for solving mysteries. She's a recent transplant to New Orleans and is head over heels in love with the city in the way only a new arrival can be. She's also at the scene of a fire that acts as the inciting incident, setting her down a path to figure out who started it. So far so good.
The prose between scenes is blatantly attempting to evoke that noir feeling (hell, there are direct shoutouts to Raymond Chandler …
I know what this book was trying to do. And I know it didn't do it particularly well. But I know that I enjoyed it anyway.
The only mystery novels I really have experience with are Agatha Christie's (who sets a high bar) and old noirs from the 40's and 50's (which is a fairly distinct style). What we have here is a burnt-out punk rocker-turned-nun protagonist with a reputation for solving mysteries. She's a recent transplant to New Orleans and is head over heels in love with the city in the way only a new arrival can be. She's also at the scene of a fire that acts as the inciting incident, setting her down a path to figure out who started it. So far so good.
The prose between scenes is blatantly attempting to evoke that noir feeling (hell, there are direct shoutouts to Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe!), and for the most part I enjoyed them. However the dialogue felt a little unnaturally rushed and interactions between characters tended to begin and end abruptly. Sister Holiday, our guitar-playing gumshoe, is persistent in tracking down leads and had as much agency as a car-less Catholic school teacher could expect to have, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I liked the concept of her character more than her execution. There's also a whole cast of side characters we rotate through as potential criminals, but some felt like they were cast aside too quickly and there's only about three of them that could credibly be the culprit.
I found it to be a perfectly serviceable mystery. However this was a book club read, where all but me and one other guy are New Orleans natives and the uniform consensus among them was decidedly not favorable towards the depiction of the city. There was also a glaring error with respect to how a diabetic character was treated (also went over my head until someone else pointed it out to me) that in retrospect is a curious mistake for the author to make. But at the end of the day, I still didn't regret my time with this book. For some reason I feel like I'm going to look back on it more fondly in a few months' time than I do right now, which is weird to think about because I'm aware of that right now in the moment...
