A New Spy Novel Set in Paris

My new book, Animals of the French Species, an espionage thriller set in Paris, will be released by Grove Atlantic in January, under the Atlantic Crime imprint. I started writing this book back in 2019 while living in Paris as a “trailing spouse.” So yes, it has been a minute.

A (tiny bit) about the book: Two years after her husband’s death, FBI Agent Lina Connerly has relocated to Paris with her teenaged son Rory. Officially, she’s posted to the Embassy to liaise between American and French counterintelligence. Unofficially, she’s hunting Calvin Cook, a fugitive American intelligence officer who leaked classified documents, fled to Russia, and is now rumored to be somewhere in France. . .

At the time I began writing the novel, we too had relocated to Paris with a teenager. We too were navigating the intricacies of Embassy life. It rained constantly, and Paris was in a mood—the Yellow Vest protests, the biggest transit strikes since the 1960s, a city on edge.

That is where real life ends and fiction begins.

Like all of my novels, Animals of the French Species borrows from my life—a sense of place deeply formed by a place I have lived, a place I’ve gotten to know intimately. If The Year of Fog was my love letter to San Francisco, Animals of the French Species is my missive to Paris—in all its beauty and despair.

Pre-order ANIMALS

So, yes, the novel was inspired by my years in the City of Light as a “trailing spouse.” (Do you know who else was a trailing spouse with the US embassy in Paris? Julia Child—whose memoir My Life in France is a joy, even for those of us who don’t find joy in cooking. And Chris Pavone drew from his life as a trailing spouse in Luxembourg for his debut novel, The Expats.)

I put everything I love and hate about Paris in the new novel, plus a behind-the-scenes glimpse of embassy life. It’s also a book about coming through grief and PTSD, restructuring one’s life in the aftermath of tragedy.

Although Animals is a standalone book, it is the second in a series. Lina Connerly first appears in The Wonder Test, a psychological suspense novel set in the ultra-competitive culture of Silicon Valley. In my mind the series is a trilogy. I have my sights set on Tallinn, Estonia. I took a very cold ferry ride to Tallinn in 2019, and the city stuck with me.

About the photo: I snapped the photo of these two men walking down Avenue Gabriel on one of my daily walks. To me, this is the essence of Paris—which, if you’re living there, is a city of office workers and industry, of labor and bureaucracy. And croissants, yes—there was a bakery I stopped at every day on my walk home. In the book, I hope I’ve captured the Paris tourists don’t often see—the work and grit, the reality of daily life against the gorgeous backdrop of an iconic city.

I look forward to sharing more with you about Animals of the French Species in the coming months. In the meantime, you can pre-order the book here.

À bientôt!

-Michelle