Margot Douaihy on Queering Crime Fiction and Embracing Metaphysical Mystery

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CrimeReads is pleased to host the cover reveal for Blessed Water, Margot Douaihy’s second novel to feature the chainsmoking, tattooed, lesbian, celibate, nun detective Sister Holiday, set in New Orleans and featuring another signature combination of the metaphysical and the mysterious. Douaihy was kind enough to answer a few questions about her most unusual detective to accompany the cover reveal. Blessed Water is forthcoming in March from Zando Books.

Can you tell us a bit about Blessed Water and Sister Holiday’s journey to becoming a detective?

Margot Douaihy: I wrote Blessed Water as a blistering, breakneck sequel to Scorched Grace, the first book in the Sister Holiday Mystery series with Gillian Flynn Books/Zando. While Scorched Grace plays with fire, Blessed Water dives into the deep end. It’s a ticking-clock mystery told in three suspenseful acts—Good Friday, Saturday, and Easter Sunday. The second in the series is an ode to submerging, rebirth, the blood oath of siblings, and the strange blessing of trust.

I love when a fiction series sets the stage for a broader arc. Each book should complicate the established characters, tear apart tropes and hurl the protagonist into new predicaments and new danger (physical and emotional). I was determined to make Blessed Water a super-fast ripper that reads like its own dizzying storm; its sinister rain harmonizes with the incineration of Scorched Grace.

The story opens again with Sister Holiday, who remains a punk, chain-smoking nun. But she’s also apprenticing Riveaux at the newly formed Redemption Detective Agency, one step closer to her dream of becoming a private eye. (She inhabits the role of the amateur sleuth in Scorched Grace.) Holiday’s twinned obsessions—sleuthing and religious service—feed her relentless quest for meaning in a broken world. When Sister Holiday sets out to meet their first client, she finds the mutilated body of a priest floating in the swollen Mississippi River. Sister Holiday feels called on by God to hunt down the murderer and keep her community safe.

Evolving the devil-may-care swaggering PI lineage of pulp classics, Sister Holiday is as devout as she is rebellious. I tried to write this sleuth with enough specificity, grit, laser focus, and bad judgment to sustain tension.

Interview continues below cover reveal.

What was the genesis of your complicated heroine?

Sister Holiday may be an unexpected lone wolf, but she’s born from the hardboiled tradition. I wanted to create a badass sleuth character who defies conventions. The first-person liturgical intensity, moral ambiguity, and hardboiled wisecracks give the narration a distinctive cadence. I’m also really passionate about the reparative potential of crime fiction, so I offer Blessed Water as a queer alternative to the ‘copaganda’ toxicity I’m frankly sick of reading. I love crime fiction that holds space for social comment, so Blessed Water is rippling with critiques of things Sister Holiday and I hate: sexism, white supremacy, homophobia, and institutional corruption. All within tight plotting, a fast pace, and a frantic, desperate dance with time.

What did you want to explore about religion, mystery, and the “endless search for answers”?

To invoke Hegel and Madonna, life is a mystery. I view religion as a batch of stories and a net of interpretive frameworks—fables, cautionary tales—offering guidance, solace, strict laws, and roadmaps, depending on who you ask. The very same religion can soothe, empower, and hurt people. Religion has been routinely weaponized to subjugate, beating people into submission whilst justifying atrocious behavior. I was raised Maronite Catholic, and it’s been a profound influence in my life, but I haven’t practiced regularly in years. Would I be offered Holy Communion in my home church since I’m an out lesbian? Doubt it. But I haven’t checked.

Sister Holiday is a kink-positive, proudly gay woman (“a dyke David to the patriarchy’s Goliath”). She is also a faithful Sister of the Sublime Blood who chooses celibacy. The choice and the dialectic—the yes and—are crucial. I wanted to narrativize queer futurity and reframe what sexual identity could mean for a virile sleuth character. There’s a history of nun-mystics who yoked ecstasy and worship. And art. In my sleuth series, the whodunnits mirror Holiday’s questions about love, happiness, and redemption. The queer sex of her narrative past is also an expression of kinetic worship, communion, and joy. Sister Holiday is constantly scanning the world, looking for clues, patterns, signs—anything to make the contradictions of her life fit. She has a taste for vice and she believes in resurrection. Sister Holiday is a full mood.

Why don’t we have more religious characters in fiction (especially reformed sinners such as Sister Holiday)?

Good question. We do have the existential woe of Pastor Sidney Chambers in James Runcie’s Grantchester Mysteries and the moral compass of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown series, among others. But we don’t have a ton of religious characters in crime fiction. Perhaps it is because some denominations are shrinking (at least in the US), so they are less present in pop culture and the mass consciousness. When I was a kid, growing up in Scranton, PA, everyone I knew attended church or a worship service. Now, hardly anyone I know attends. There also might be a dearth of religious characters because institutions have wrought so much damage. It’s painful. From the atrocities of Residential Schools to the horrific laundries in Ireland, the Catholic Church has exploited marginalized communities. People of color and LGBTQ people have been immeasurably harmed. My books bear witness to it all. Religion is a third rail, but that’s exactly why I want to touch it. No one “owns” religion. Everyone has a personal, nuanced relationship with their faith. If we don’t start talking more candidly about religion and taking more creative risks in our art, I fear we might cede more ground to the tyrants.

I have lost count of the readers who have DM’d me or approached me at Scorched Grace readings to share how Sister Holiday has helped them heal their Catholic trauma. I’m so stunned and grateful for that! I love when queer readers share their experiences. Sister Holiday helped me heal too. Every time I walk by a church now, I don’t feel the onset of a panic attack, I simply wonder what kind of mischief our punk nun might be up to in there.

Why did you decide to place Sister Holiday in New Orleans? What draws people to the city so strongly?

The narrative toggles back and forth from New York to New Orleans, two different urban environments, but both with seedy underbellies, alleyways, secret societies, hardscrabble pockets, and entrenched corruption. New Orleans is one hell of a survivor. The city is also steeped in queer history and Black excellence. I set my series there because of its understory and its radical potential. The city’s mix of French, Spanish, African, and Creole influences is profound, not to mention its intertwined spiritual and religious roots, from ghost stories to Catholicism to voodoo. When I lived in New Orleans, from 2008 to 2010, I frequently walked by an abandoned convent and imagined the history inside those crumbling walls. To quote Sister Holiday, “They say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. But New Orleans is the crucible. The home of miracles and curses.” For anyone keen on reading great stories set in New Orleans, check out books by Jesymn Ward, Greg Herren, and J.M. Redmann, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, James Lee Burke, Kwei Quartey, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Alaina Urquhart, just to name a few.

Will Sister Holiday be appearing in more novels after this one? Why did you decide to stick with the character for more adventures (I’m certainly happy you did)?

Absolutely. Sister Holiday’s ride has just begun. Scorched Grace was a riff on the anti-redemption arc. I won’t give Blessed Water away, but let’s just say, it’s about the genuine agony of rebirth. This character has deep wounds, needs, and she’s figuring herself out as she investigates each new mystery. More than anything, Sister Holiday has a ravenous will to live, stare down the storm, and cannonball into the unknown.

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