Book Review: Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy

After the traumatic occasions chronicled in Margot Douaihy’s debut novel Scorched Grace, our heroine Sister Vacation is settling again into her life because the youngest servant with the Sisters of the Elegant Blood in New Orleans. Solely six months away from taking everlasting vows, she and Sister Honor – the one different nun in her convent and by default the Performing Mom Superior – rattle round Saint Sebastian’s, getting on one another’s nerves. Sister Vacation, not less than, has loads of issues to maintain her busy:

Moreover being a nun, I used to be a music instructor at Saint Sebastian’s, a part-time non-public eye, and a full-time ache within the ass for PI Magnolia Riveaux, the hellcat who ran Redemption Detective Company[.] She might have been my blood sister with the methods we protected and irritated and appreciated and disenchanted one another. Riveaux was the brains, I used to be the bear lure. Steel enamel and all. One I latched on, you’d must gnaw off your individual leg to eliminate me. However we understood one another. Not that we had been all the time sunshine and unicorns. Extra like hailstorms and cobras.

Sister Vacation is likely to be lukewarm about getting together with different folks, however she’s wholly smitten by apprenticing as a PI underneath Riveaux’s tutelage. Once they’re contacted by a vengeful spouse searching for grime on her dishonest partner, they’re thrilled to exit on their very first case, assembly their new consumer at Pier 11 on the waterfront. They’re thus shocked to seek out, as an alternative of an sad partner, the mutilated corpse of the priest who tends to St. Sebastian’s.

Father Reese had not been Sister Vacation’s favourite individual, however even he deserved higher than to be murdered and dumped into the Mississippi River’s rising waters. Issues get murkier when Sister Vacation returns to the convent and discovers that their latest priest, Father Nathan, has additionally disappeared. Was he taken and harmed as nicely, or is one thing much more sinister afoot?

May he have been the sufferer of a hate crime? Bigots despise progress. And people bastards could be particularly offended by Father Nathan, a pacesetter, a Black man rising by means of the ranks, possibly steering an previous ship in a brand new path. I used to be getting forward of myself. A office hazard as a PI apprentice nun.

 

He didn’t appear upset yesterday. However everybody was masking one thing–what was his secret

 

Did our new priest homicide the previous priest, then flee? It was as far-fetched as any grainy thriller on PBS, but it surely’s a surprising miracle we will belief anybody. We don’t inform ourselves core truths, not to mention each other. Folks we’re closest to will inform the largest lies. Belief is the best suspension of disbelief. I ought to know.

Because the rains pour down on town, Sister Vacation and Riveaux should navigate flooded streets and a tangled internet of deceit to be able to determine what occurred to St. Sebastian’s monks, in a determined race to save lots of the lives of the harmless. However what’s going to they do when their very own lives are on the road, within the face of huge institutional wrongdoing?

Douaihy does one other distinctive job of analyzing the that means of religion within the lifetime of maybe the world’s unlikeliest nun. Sister Vacation struggles not solely with the idea of justice, each earthly and divine, but in addition together with her personal private needs as a lesbian and addict. Her tough relationships together with her household and family members actually don’t assist, as a determine from her previous unexpectedly exhibits as much as drive her to reckon with it. 

The creator’s background as a poet is instantly obvious not solely within the occasional beautiful flip of phrase, but in addition within the oft-repeated imagery of water as each cleanser and curse. I do really feel that the prose does sometimes stagger from one set piece to the subsequent with little curiosity within the connective tissue of different folks’s noticed reactions, however that is of a chunk with the narrator’s basic absorption in her personal ideas and emotions. Maybe Sister Vacation’s powers of remark will enhance together with her detecting abilities because the sequence progresses. These books are actually a essential critique of entrenched energy, in addition to a reminder of the facility of affection and religion even when up towards overwhelming odds.

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