Breakaway Books

Authored by Clemence Michallon; Published July 2025; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

If you are looking for a nice psychological thriller for the beach, Our Last Resort should be on your list. It’s got a beautiful setting and just enough action to keep it interesting.

In Our Last Resort, Gabriel and Frida have hidden away at a fancy resort in Utah to discuss the possibility of participating in a documentary about their dramatic pasts. The two met growing up on a cult compound in New York, escaped together, and managed to build semi-successful lives relying on each other. But Gabriel has had more than this share of trouble, falling in love with a rich woman and subsequently becoming the prime suspect in her murder. Now, another rich woman has died at their resort and Gabriel is under the microscope once more.

This novel strongly features the “psychological” part of the psychological thriller. Threaded throughout is the concept of guilt: deserved guilt, undeserved guilt; perceived guilt, hidden guilt. Told in the first person, we get a lot of information about Frida’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, and she struggles mightily with the sins she has committed. At the center of the novel is the relationship between Frida and Gabriel, forged in the fire of the cult their escape through questionable means. Guilt is at the core of their relationship, the two constantly dancing around the fact that they both know they have done something truly awful: arson, committed jointly, to destroy the house of the cult leader, but ultimately resulting in the death of one of his top lieutenants. There’s not a lot of twists thrown in to the murder mystery part of the novel, but there is a constant questioning of what we know to be true versus what we suspect.

Frida and Gabriel’s cult is described with an intriguing amount of realism in the novel. Of course, yes, there is the stereotypical cult leader, Emile, who has sex with all the women and abuses the children through hunger and labor. But there is also the acknowledgment that Emile is kind of dumb and able to get away with a lot simply by depriving the members of any knowledge of the outside world. There’s the fact that Frida and Gabriel can’t just run away from the cult and magically have new, shiny lives. They have to learn what money is; they have to learn where the train station is (they have to learn what trains are!); they have to find a way to get legal documentation, because they were both born off the grid. Cults can appear spooky and ethereal in some novels, but this one really got down to the brass tacks of what escaping a cult looks like.  

Our Last Resort leans into the concept of guilt hard, but it still manages to be a light enough thriller to qualify as a beach read. Put it on your list for the summer!