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 (#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. The novel is structured around the violence or threat of confinement, of walls closing in. How do physical apparatus and spaces—classrooms, prison, the veil, the heat itself—mirror Sister Holiday’s psychological state?
3. Sister Holiday's past with addiction becomes central to this case. How does Douaihy handle the complexity of addiction as both a very personal demon and a societal epidemic… in a nuanced queer body? What does Sister Holiday's arc suggest about recovery, relapse, and redemption? How does faith fit in?
4. The allure of the abyss and the earth element invade and pervade this mystery. How does this contrast with the previous book's water imagery? What does it suggest about Sister Holiday's evolution?
5. Snakes appear as a recurring symbol throughout Divine Ruin. How do they function within the Garden of Eden mythology that this novel invokes, and noir/crime fiction more broadly?
6. Sister Holiday goes undercover with a local gang. How does this strategic “deception” agitate her vows and her sense of self/selves? What does it reveal about the performative aspects of identity? As a nun? A woman in America?
7. The preparation for Sister Holiday's permanent vow ceremony runs parallel to her investigation. How do these two journeys intersect? What does it mean to commit to faith while confronting the darkest aspects of human nature?
Discussion Questions: BLESSED WATER (#2)
1. Tattoos function as ritual adornment/scarification in the novel. How does Sister Holiday's ink serve as a personal history, a burden, and a spiritual practice for her? What do they reveal about the book’s relationship to the corporeal being, “truth,” the erotics of pain, and transformation?
2. Water functions as a literal and metaphorical “force” throughout the novel. How does Douaihy use water imagery to explore themes of cleansing, drowning, rebirth, purification, destruction?
3. Sister Holiday and Magnolia Riveaux's partnership deepens in this novel. How does their relationship evolve from the first book? What do they each bring to the Redemption Detective Agency, and what do they seek from each other?
4. The discovery of a priest's dead body in the Mississippi River launches the central mystery. How does this case challenge Sister Holiday's relationship with the Catholic Church hierarchy?
5. The novel is described as “queering Aristotle’s three act structure.” How does the traditional mystery structure bend to accommodate Sister Holiday's unconventional approach to detection and faith
6. Flooding serves as both natural disaster and metaphor throughout the novel. How do the rising floodwaters parallel the escalating stakes of the mystery? What does it mean for truth to "surface" during a flood?
7. Critics have noted that Sister Holiday is "slowly healing religious trauma" for readers. How does the novel address religious trauma while maintaining Sister Holiday's genuine faith? What does healing look like in this context?
8. The novel explores "the blood oath of siblings" and family secrets. How does Sister Holiday's chosen family (the convent, Magnolia) compare to biological family loyalties? What are the costs and benefits of each?
9. Her 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? How are they surprisingly similar? What does it suggest about authenticity and performance?
10. The novel builds toward Easter Sunday, traditionally a day of resurrection and renewal. How does the Easter timeline inform the mystery's resolution? What does Sister Holiday's "punk baptism" suggest about ritual itself?
Discussion Questions: SCORCHED GRACE (#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 and 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?
10. What do notions of friendship and sisterhood mean to Sister Holiday? To the other characters in the novel? How do they shift and change?
11. What is the role of fire in SCORCHED GRACE—metaphorically and within the plot?
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.