Divine Ruin by Margot Douaihy
In 2023, Margot Douaihy introduced crime fiction to an unforgettable new heroine in the form of a tatted-up, punk rock, cigarette-smoking, lesbian nun named Sister Holiday. Having spectacularly blown up her life in Brooklyn — her family, her girlfriend, her band — she’d fled to the only place that would take her, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans, where she now spends her days doing menial tasks and teaching guitar to kids in the affiliated parochial school.
But though she has been chastened, she hasn’t been tamed. In her first novel, Scorched Grace, her obsession with the truth led her to investigate the death of a student during a fire at the school. In Blessed Water, it was the case of a priest found floating in the Mississippi River during a spate of torrential rainstorms and floods. Both books crackled with astonishing energy, unpredictable twists and remarkable prose. Both were award finalists and named by the New York Times as among the best crime novels of the year.
From Brooklyn Chaos to New Orleans Shadows
Douaihy’s new book, Divine Ruin, may be her best one yet, partly because the stakes are so personal, not only to Sister Holiday, but to all of us. Counting down the last heat-sodden days before the end of the school year and her own impending Rubicon – the official taking of permanent vows – her world is shaken when a senior she’s particularly fond of, named Fleur Benoit, is found dead from drug poisoning. Sister Holiday knows addiction all too well from her own past — “Drugs promise rebirth, but they lie” — but her grief turns to rage when it becomes clear that the pill Fleur took was supposed to be only an upper to cram for finals — a “study buddy” — but instead was laced with fentanyl.
As more students start to fall victim to the modern plague, she charges headlong into the drug dealer underworld of New Orleans to uncover the source, working in partnership with former fire inspector Maggie Riveaux, with whom Holiday’s formed a detective agency on the side. But Maggie doesn’t know the half of what Holiday is up to and the secrets she is carrying.
Obsession, Redemption and the Fight Against a Modern Plague
In the first book, Scorched Grace, Holiday wondered, “Obsession kept me going. What would I have if I stopped? What would I lose if I kept going?”
In Divine Ruin, she is about to find out. In the deep, dark journey she has begun, Sister Holiday will have to confront her own worst nightmares and ours. A nerve-wracking mixture of the sacred and the profane, it is a story of love, faith, despair — and redemption.
Its last line: “No, I didn’t look back.”
Neither will you.
About Margot Douaihy:
Margot Douaihy is a writer, poet, and scholar based in Northampton, MA. She holds a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
Douaihy is the author of the critically acclaimed Sister Holiday Mystery series. Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books) was named a Best Crime Novel of 2023 by The New York Times, The Guardian, Apple Books, and others. Its sequel, Blessed Water, earned a Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ Crime Fiction and appeared on the New York Times Best Crime Novel list in 2024. The third installment, Divine Ruin, is forthcoming in January 2026. She is also the author of Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, a true-crime poetry project, and Scranton Lace, a documentary poetry collection.
A Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Crime Narrative series and Multimodal/Multimedia Section Editor of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Douaihy’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Florida Review, Vanity Fair, PBS NewsHour, and more. She serves as Assistant Professor at Emerson College and has received numerous honors, including the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Emerging Writer Award and a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship.
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