What is the title of your latest release?
RE:CLAIM – A Sultryverse story
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
After an eighteen-year-old French heiress is blamed for fighting off an attempted assault, she is sent to an elite Swiss boarding school built to contain the scandals of the ultra-wealthy. With a brilliant hacker she cannot stop thinking about, she uncovers a vault of blackmail material and builds Les Louves, an anonymous collective determined to expose powerful men without exploiting their victims.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I wanted old money, reputation, and secrecy to feel like parts of the same machine. Paris gave the story polish and social pressure; a private island, an elite Swiss boarding school, and a bank vault gave it institutional secrecy and physical stakes. The settings look immaculate, which made them perfect places to hide ugly systems.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Absolutely, but I would let Manon choose the venue. She is loyal, funny, stylish, and ferociously protective. I would also make sure my passport was current, because an ordinary drink with Manon has a way of turning into an international incident.
What are three words that describe your hero?
RE:CLAIM deliberately has no traditional male hero. Only heroines. Brilliant, resilient, consent-forward bisexual and sapphic badasses.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Revenge is more interesting when it has an ethical boundary. Les Louves became much more powerful once their mission was not simply to expose powerful men, but to expose the system without republishing victims’ pain.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
The first draft is a straight line with no looking back. Subsequent drafts are where the work really happens, shaping the unruly characters populating my pages into something that becomes more coherent. But I do every edit linearly and don’t look back until having run through the whole manuscript again. About 7-10 run-throughs, I hand it cover to my incredible editor, who gives me further feedback before we get to a final version.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I cannot write without having at least 2 dark chocolate bars nearby. There’s something about sweet and dark that mixes well not just in chocolate but also in writing.
Describe your writing space/office!
First, it has to include lots of books. As I’m looking around my laptop, I have at least 20-30 books within reach without moving from my chair, and a few hundreds more on the shelves behind me. I joke around that it’s my Large Language Model (LLMs are the thing AI does) and I grab ideas from all the stuff I read, all the stuff I’ve seen, all the experiences I’ve had to mix them up into something new.
Who is an author you admire?
Gabriel García Márquez. I admire the balance and inevitability of his prose: the sense that every word, action, and punctuation mark belongs exactly where it is. Patricia Highsmith because she creates tension on the page while still holding you so close.
Is there a book that changed your life?
I return to three books almost every year: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and 1984. I do not wish I had written them; I am simply in awe of how carefully they are built, with almost nothing feeling accidental or extra. Someday, I hope to have Garcia Marquez’s breadth, Hurston’s ability to channel women finding their voice, and Orwell’s command of language.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
There was no single glamorous call. I chose independence after a publisher stopped distributing an earlier book while continuing to hold the rights. That experience made creative control feel less like a luxury and more like a necessity (and became the inevitable part of the plot of AcClaim). Publishing independently means hiring the editors, designers, and other partners myself, but it also means the work remains mine and I decide how the Sultryverse grows. The control freak in me likes that but it’s a lot more work. I’m thankful for having gone through the traditional publishing process under an earlier name because it gave me the scaffolding, I needed to do this independently.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
I read eclectically, but I gravitate toward literary fiction, suspense, and speculative fiction: books with a strong voice, a little danger, and something to say about power. On any given day, I may read a commercial treatise, a history of something obscure, a classic, or something really trashy.
What’s your favorite movie?
That’s a very hard one as I watch movies as much as I read. For RE:CLAIM, there were quite a few inspirations: “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal, definitely brought some of the manic energy I already was seeking for Manon; Oceans 8 gave me the type of heist cast I wanted; The original adaptation of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which I saw before reading the book) also had its influence; But I’m also a sucker for a good romcom and I believe we need more of them these days.
What is your favorite season?
There’s a magic period in New York City, which is usually somewhere between the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer. It’s magical because you’re breaking free of the winter cold induced claustrophobia and are feeling the hopes of new warmth before the crushing heat of summer.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Most people celebrate my birthday without knowing it because it happens to fall on that special day in the middle of February. For me, chocolate and red wine have to be part of it. I also believe you should celebrate your birthday for as many days as you’re turning years. So the celebration gets longer with the passing of time.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Any novel that gives us a Cemetery of Forgotten Books feels almost perfectly designed to ruin my schedule in the best possible way (and the next books in the series are pretty incredible too).
TV Show: There’s this amazing show on Netflix that too many people haven’t seen called Sens8. It was quite queer and I recently discovered it (sadly, it’s been cancelled)
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Living in New York, it’s hard to pick just one. On any given day, you might find me eating through different countries around the city. One thing I’d say is that I’m not crazy about eastern European cooking but everything else seems pretty fair game.
What do you do when you have free time?
I read, watch films and plays, look at art, follow the news, and invent backstories for strangers. I count most of that as part of writing, though, because sooner or later it all finds its way into the stories.
What can readers expect from you next?
More stories from the Sultryverse. Re:Claim is an independently readable prequel to AcClaim, and I want to continue with stories of women who turn private survival into collective power. I have a couple of new characters who need to complete the backward journey in this world and then we’re going back forward. So a book a year in the Sultryverse for the next few years is where I’m headed. And some of my existing characters have full background readers don’t know about yet. I hope they’ll stick around to find out.
RE:CLAIM by Jean Thesquare
Eighteen‑year‑old French heiress Manon de Rochemaure learns that in the world of elite European privilege, silence is often treated as easier than the truth. After violently defending herself against an attempted sexual assault by her entitled classmate, Étienne Servan, Manon is quietly transferred to Le Rolle Academy, an exclusive Swiss boarding school designed to manage the scandals of the ultra‑wealthy.
But Manon refuses to be quietly managed. Guided by her brilliant hacker friend and romantic interest, Anaïs Diop, Manon discovers that Étienne’s media‑magnate father, Laurent Servan, is hiding something far more dangerous. Anaïs traces a hidden data trail to a highly secure Swiss bank vault containing an extensive archive of illicit recordings and blackmail material used to exploit young women.
Teaming up with her sharp‑witted American roommate Beatrice, a security expert named Noa, and a conflicted banker’s son, Lucian, Manon orchestrates a daring heist to breach the vault and steal the hard drives. To dismantle Servan’s empire, the teenagers form an anonymous whistleblower collective called Les Louves (The Wolves), fronted by a digital persona named “Belle”. Their strict code: expose the corrupt systems and the men who run them, but never publish the victims’ pain.
RE:CLAIM is a gripping, consent‑forward thriller that blends dark academia with a fierce feminist revenge narrative. Exploring themes of institutional betrayal, complex sapphic romance, and the power of underground networks, it is a story about victims refusing to be silenced, proving that when feral is all you have left, fierce is the only way forward.
Mystery | LGBTQ Romance [ Author Self-Published, On Sale: October 1, 2026, e-Book, / eISBN: 9798999956675 ]
Buy RE:CLAIM: Kindle | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Jean Thesquare
Jean Thesquare is a New York City based writer.
AcClaim was their first novel. Re:claim is their latest.
Everything else is a rumor.
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