Scorched Grace

DEBUT The first novel by poet Douaihy, coeditor of Cambridge’s Elements in Crime Narratives series, features punk rocker–turned–music teacher Sister Holiday, the only chain-smoking, tattooed, queer nun of the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans, who tends to confiscate her students’ cigarettes. She’s sneaking a smoke in the alley beside the convent when the school erupts in fire and the janitor’s flaming body drops from a second-floor window. Sister Holiday rushes in, finds two students trapped in a classroom, and helps save them. When she overhears the fire investigator declaring the blaze an arson, Sister Holiday turns investigator to expose the firebug; though she never went to college, her father was a cop, and she’s read plenty of old PI novels. Then the police rule a second death accidental, and Sister Holiday concludes that only she cares enough to find the arsonist who seems determined to shut down her small religious order.