Our Last Resort
Clemence Michallon
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, $29
Frida has booked a suite at an upscale resort in the Utah desert to spend some time reconnecting with her mildly estranged brother Gabriel. We first meet her in the wee hours of the morning, contemplating the delight of her surroundings as she slips out for a late-night cigarette on the private patio, and she immediately lets us know that joy is not her typical state of mind.
Frida is an anxiety-ridden wreck, in fact, for all sorts of reasons that will become excruciatingly clear. But in this one post-midnight moment, she dares to drink in her sleeping sibling’s presence and the elegance of their surroundings with something approaching relish—which is shattered, before she’s even had a chance to get a second drag on her smoke, by the realization that she’s not alone. Two of their fellow guests, a wealthy older man and his trophy wife, are caught up in an intense conversation just out of sight.
Instead of ignoring the situation, as some might, Frida butts out her cigarette and scoots out the door of the suite to get closer to the couple, eavesdropping on what turns out to be their argument. She’s already noticed that things aren’t easy between the couple and is compelled to learn a bit more.
Odd? Our narrator is decidedly odd. But as we soon learn, she has her reasons for that. Raised in a cult led by a narcissistic French-born sociopath, she grew up knowing only a tissue of lies and a spider web of restrictions all fashioned to allow one man absolute dominance over the people who live with him on the decaying campus of a former boarding school in an unspecified Hudson Valley town. No one knows who their birth parents are, no one leaves the compound except Emile, and life revolves around his bizarre teachings and rigid rules: beige homemade uniforms, bland vegetarian meals, adults as an undifferentiated class of mothers and another of fathers, and Emile’s long-winded lectures about the sins and danger of the World Out There.
The man she considers her brother is a fellow survivor; they first met trapped in an isolation closet as punishment, clung together after that for comfort, and would eventually find a way out together. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a rocky road, but Frida has a gift for math and Gabriel is an avid student of history and they’ve both managed to cobble together adult lives.
Now, in Utah, they’ve come together to discuss his decision to participate in a documentary about the cult. But when the trophy wife is brutally murdered and the wealthy older man manages to deflect suspicion onto Gabriel, any chance they might have had to sort that issue out is eclipsed by the drama of the moment.
Little by little, Michallon raises the curtain on Frida and Gabriel’s intensely challenging childhood, on what they had to do to survive, to escape, and then to navigate New York City as absolute novices. We come to understand how Frida has imposed a civilized veneer over her feral inner self. The police would much rather pin Trophy Wife’s death on nerdish Gabriel, with his murky past, than try to convict her wealthy, powerful widower.
Gabriel’s behavior has been odd, leaving Frida with unanswered questions about how well she truly knows him, yet she is quite sure that Powerful Widower and not her chosen sibling was the one who bashed Samantha’s head in with a rock. Can she prove it? It’s a problem that will demand all of her feral toughness and hard-won knowledge of human nature.
Meanwhile, Frida has secrets of her own, and is emotionally treading water on the surface of a rough sea indeed. Living in her head will never be easy, and Michallon, a Rhinebeck resident, brings us into that claustrophobic reality and lets us empathize—only to stun with a revelation darker than we ever expected. Desperate people do desperate things, after all.
Stylishly written, replete with sensory detail that brings both posh resort and grubby cult compound to vivid life, Our Last Resort is the sort of book that raises all sorts of unanswerable questions that transcend the outlines of its plot, compelling and fun to read. One might have passed Frida on the wide sidewalks of the avenue, in the restaurant foyer, and never have guessed the secrets of her heart—rendering them comprehensible is a feat that elevates Our Last Resort beyond the bounds of an ordinary thriller into a vivid and unsettling character study.
This article appears in September 2025.
