Clémence
Michallon’s sophomore novel, Our Last Resort, is a powerful psychological
crime thriller, written using several timelines to tell the story of self-made
siblings Frida and Gabriel. The pair grew up cloistered in a cult in upstate
New York led by a charismatic and fanatical leader from birth to adulthood,
when they made a daring escape from the compound.
Hitting shelves July 8, the book is set in the desert beauty of Escalante,
Utah, at a luxury hotel where Frida and Gabriel agree to meet to repair the fracture
in their bond that has developed over the last few years since Gabriel moved to
the West Coast to get far away from the past. They enjoy swimming in the pool
and taking desert trail hikes until a young woman who was also vacationing
there turns up dead.
The
situation quickly unravels as the police sort things out. When the first
suspect, the dead woman’s husband, has his lawyer clear his name, suspicion
falls upon Gabriel who has a well-publicized skeleton in his closet. Haunted by
his past both during his cult years as well as during a troubled marriage,
Gabriel is devastated at this latest turn of events.
United by
the trauma of their upbringing, Frida refuses to believe Gabriel even knew the
dead woman. As she doubles down to develop an alternate scenario regarding the murder,
looking for evidence the police missed, how much will be enough to clear
Gabriel of the crime?
As the back
story develops alongside the present-day timeline, the climax explodes with a
big reveal readers will not see coming.
Clémence
Michallon burst into the writing world with The Quiet Tenant in 2023.
Her background includes being a journalist whose work has appeared in The
New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, The Independent, and
more. Born and raised near Paris, she moved to the United States in 2014 where
she lives in New York.
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