The Guest Room
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of A Light in the Ruins and The Sandcastle Girls comes the story of a bachelor party gone horribly wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two women are on the run from police and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams in this spellbinding tale of murder and sex trafficking.
When Richard Chapman offers to host his younger brother's bachelor party he expects a certain amount of debauchery. He sends his wife, Kristin, and his young daughter off to his mother-in-law's for the weekend and he opens his Westchester home to his brother's friends and their hired entertainment. What he does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, a dangerously intimate moment in his guest bedroom, and two naked women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
In the aftermath, Richard's life rapidly spirals into nightmare. The police throw him out of his home, now a crime scene, his investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave, and his wife finds herself unable to forgive him for the moment he shared with a dark-haired girl in the guestroom. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, faces a much graver danger. Stolen from her family as a teenager and locked away in hotel rooms and a closely-guarded cottage, Alexandra has been held captive by oligarchs for years. But now, in one breathless, violent night, she is free, running to escape the police who will arrest her and the gangsters who will kill her in a heartbeat. A captivating, chilling story about shame, scandal and the sex trade, The Guest Room is a riveting novel from a great storyteller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest novel, Bohjalian (Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands) stacks the deck against his well-to-do main character, Richard Chapman, who holds a bachelor party in his Bronxville home for his younger brother, Philip. Richard sends his wife and daughter into Manhattan for the night, a good thing, because the two strippers hired for the occasion turn out to be Russian sex slaves, who kill the two pimps who accompany them to the party before fleeing into the night. Earlier, one of them, a beautiful Armenian girl named Alexandra, almost managed to seduce Richard before he changes his mind. In the aftermath of the murders, Richard is turned out of his house, which has become a crime scene with reporters camped outside, and forced to hire a lawyer. As the consequences of the night pile up, Richard becomes estranged from his wife, is banned from his office, and finds himself the target of a blackmailer from the party who has an incriminating cell phone video of him and Alexandra. And then there is Alexandra herself, who returns to the scene of the crime, tailed by her seriously scary Russian bosses. It is to the author's credit that he takes this situation and makes it somewhat credible. Juxtaposed against the upper-class setting is Alexandra's own account of being sold into slavery, which deserves a less sudsy book of its own.
