Book Club Guide & Syllabus Builder

Hi. 🖤

There’s a singular thrill in experiencing the new within the familiar, to shred the template while honoring the continuum of crime writing. It’s the opportunity and the challenge of writing genre. In this generative spirit, I’m so grateful to share the Sister Holiday Mystery series with you. It’s my take on a hardboiled-inspired ripper with queer characters, big moods, wild hearts, and noir signatures.

Thank you for believing in the power of stories.

Margot

Discussion Questions: DIVINE RUIN (Book #3)

1. Sister Holiday is a chain-smoking, queer, feminist, unapologetic punk nun who genuinely loves God & devotes herself to the church. Are these aspects of her identity contradictions, creative tensions, self-sabotage, complements? All of the above? None?

2. How do external realities—classrooms, the church, the veil, New Orleans, heat itself—agitate or validate Sister Holiday’s inner life & psychological state?

3. The preparation for Sister Holiday's permanent vow ceremony as a Sister of the Sublime Blood runs parallel to her investigation of the drug influx. How do these journeys diverge & intersect?

4. What do notions of friendship & sisterhood mean to Sister Holiday? To the other characters in the novel? How do they shift and change across the series?

Discussion Questions: BLESSED WATER (Book #2)

1. Tattoos (so many!) symbolize ritual adornment/scarification in the novel. How does Sister Holiday's ink serve as a bit of her personal history, a liability, and even a spiritual practice for her? What does the ink reveal about the book’s relationship to the corporeal being, “truth,” the erotics of pain and transformation?

2. Water functions as quite a “force” throughout the novel. How does water imagery explore themes of cleansing, drowning, rebirth, purification, destruction?

3. The novel explores "the blood oath of siblings" and family secrets. How does Sister Holiday's accidental or chosen family (the convent, Magnolia Riveaux) compare to her relationship with Moose and her biological family loyalties?

4. Sister Holiday’s gold tooth appears as a recurring symbol. How does this detail function in terms of Sister Holiday's punk identity versus her religious calling, and her obsession with being a PI? What does it suggest about authenticity… and performance?

5. The novel builds toward Easter Sunday, traditionally a day of resurrection & renewal. How does the sacred timeline inform the mystery's reveal? What does Sister Holiday's "punk baptism" suggest about the limits & gifts of a ritual—sacred or otherwise?

Discussion Questions: SCORCHED GRACE (Book #1)

1.     Sister Holiday’s first-person narration is the engine of this novel. What do we learn about this character’s life and point-of-view from the way she observes the world and how she chooses to tell her story? How reliable is Sister Holiday as our narrator? What does this suggest about truth-telling, in both detective fiction and spiritual practice? Is the sleuth novel an epistemological form?

2.     How would you describe the relationship between Investigator Maggie Riveaux and Sister Holiday? What do these women see and bring out in one another? What do both women need? What do both women fear? Why?

3.     Masquerade and music are narrative refrains in SCORCHED GRACE. How are these motifs explored in the book, and what do they reveal about the characters’ inner lives and external worlds?

4.     Why does Sister Holiday consider herself a “lone wolf stalking the dark?” How does SCORCHED GRACE thematize obsession, vengeance, redemption, and love? 

5.     In literature and film, mood is a feeling and tone is often described as attitude. What are the mood and tone of SCORCHED GRACE? How do they dovetail with the plot?

6.     How is New Orleans described versus how the convent is described? How did the sense of place and setting influence your reading of SCORCHED GRACE?

7.     What does this novel offer to the discourse around trauma & sexual violence? How is addiction narrativized? Who is addicted, and why? What are the crimes behind the crimes?

8.     Intertextuality is the relationship between texts or books. How does intertextuality function in SCORCHED GRACE, regarding crime fiction, the Bible, and song lyrics?

9.     Sister Holiday has a complex relationship with motherly figures, and yet she describes the quiet moments with new moms in the Prison Birth Center in rapturous detail. Why? How does this book comment on maternity, matrilineal lineages, and inheritances?

Syllabus Builder

The hardboiled sleuth stirs up trouble as they attempt to solve a case and restore order, if only for a brief moment. To read various takes on the hardnosed PI figure, consider reading THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler, THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett, A RAGE IN HARLEM by Chester Himes, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley, and A IS FOR ALIBI by Sue Grafton. How does SCORCHED GRACE re-imagine, disassemble, reassemble, derange, and honor these hard-nosed, hard-living PI and sleuth tropes? 

For content warnings and a first-edition HC editorial correction for SCORCHED GRACE, check here.

For more information, visit Gillian Flynn Books, a Zando imprint.