Our Last Resort is out today!

Here's what it means to me. Also, I'm going on tour

A note: I wrote this newsletter yesterday, the day before Our Last Resort’s publication day, on the train that was taking me to New York City for my launch event at The Strand. I finished writing it just as MetroNorth pulled into Grand Central. Then I had to rush to my apartment, steam my dress, fix my hair, head to the bookstore, do the event, go home, grab some food and some sleep… before heading to Boston first thing this morning for my first tour stop. All of which is to say, I know it sounds absurd, but I didn’t have a minute to add a banner image to this post and hit “publish” until today. This means that parts of this post are now obsolete. But it captures my pre-publication day thoughts, which are more interesting than my publication day thoughts, which can all be summarized by “that deafening thing you hear when the sound on the TV is not working so you press the remote to make the volume really high and then the sound on the TV suddenly starts working again and the speakers blare so loudly your walls start vibrating.”

But also—Our Last Resort is out now! Tell a friend! Come see me on tour!

As I dust off this newsletter and finally make good on my promise to update my Substack, there are only a few hours left until my new book, a crime novel titled Our Last Resort, is out in the world. In the timeless words of Elle Woods: “We did it!”

First things first: I’m going on tour starting tomorrow. All the information is here. The launch event is in New York City at The Strand on July 7, after which I’m headed to Brookline, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Columbus (for the Columbus Book Festival), Rhinebeck, Saratoga Springs, Kinderhook, Madison, then back to New York City for the Bryant Park Reading Room, after which I’ll go to Cherry Hill and Alexandria.

When I first started learning about US publishing many years ago, the concept of book tours kind of blew my mind. It just seemed like such a playful, lively, rollicking way to sell books! Over the past two years, I’ve been lucky to do a lot of bookstore events and book festivals. Meeting readers, writers, and book people at large makes me feel alive and happy. I’m really excited to hit the road. Please come say hi!

As I type this, there are a few hours left to enter the final pre-publication giveaway for Our Last Resort on Goodreads. You can do so right here.

The book has received generous reviews from the trades. I wanted to include them all here, but I’m currently tethering off my phone in order to access the internet, and I’m not sure that my AT&T prepaid phone plan (it’s a long story having to do with being an immigrant and moving to the US without a credit score) will allow me enough data to do so.

Instead, here’s the most recent, which also happens to be one of my favorites, from Publishers Weekly. “Michallon nimbly balances pace, plot, and character, never skewing so literary that she alienates genre fans or so popcorn that the stakes feel flimsy. The result is a robust and memorable whodunit.” Hell yeah!

The book has also received a couple of lovely mentions in The New York Times, including on this list of 20 Books Coming in July this one of 31 Novels Coming This Summer.

It also made a couple of roundups on CrimeReads, including this one of the best psychological thrillers of July 2025. Speaking of CrimeReads, I have a new essay on there about why luxury hotels are gold for crime novelists. Gold, I tell you!

Books are funny in many ways, including the fact that they live with you through every moment of your life during the time you are writing them. I finished the first draft of Our Last Resort the day before The Quiet Tenant (my debut thriller) came out in June 2023. Right after I sent the draft to my agent, I dropped my laptop and broke its screen for good.

I continued working on Our Last Resort (from a new laptop) for a bit more than a year after that, not including copy edits and first and second pass pages (aka the things that happen once the novel itself has achieved its final form). This book was with me during very happy times and during more difficult ones. It was with me during the summertime and it was with me during (part of) a dreadfully snowy Hudson Valley winter.

I don’t like talking about myself all that much (it’s easier to make up stories about people that don’t exist) but I will tell you this: during the time I was working on this book, my grandfather died. I dropped everything (well, almost everything) and flew to Paris for his funeral. I say “almost everything” because that’s the thing with books: you bring the work with you everywhere, all the time. Or at least I do. That’s my favorite thing about this worK: everywhere I go, whatever I’m doing, there’s a thing in my head that belongs only to me, a thing my mind can play with. Sometimes, it’s not even voluntary. It just happens.

And so, I will tell you that on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, there was a moment, after the service and before we left the crematorium, when I was standing with my family, and my mind wandered back to this novel that had been occupying it for months. It was a sad day, an emotional day, a day when I reconnected with my extended relatives, whom I see too rarely. And it was then, in those strange circumstances, jet-lagged out of my mind, that I came up with the last paragraph of this novel.

Haruki Murakami has a great book out called Novelist As a Vocation. It’s a perfect craft book for novelists who are still getting used to the idea that there is now more than one book with their name on it in the world. He basically says (and I’m paraphrasing here, and probably oversimplifying, and for that I am sorry, I really recommend reading the book) that anyone can write a novel (that sounds slightly optimistic to me, but he knows more than I do), but it’s the novels you write after that first one that make you a working writer. In his view (as I understood it when I read the book, which I’m now quoting from memory), there is intrinsic value in continuing to do the work: continuing to write, staying published.

Our Last Resort is the novel that made me a working novelist. From tomorrow onward, it will belong to the readers more than it will belong to me. Thank you so much for letting me do this work. It’s my favorite thing in the world.