When he offers to host his younger brother's bachelor party, Richard Chapman hopes inviting the raucous men to his home in a charming, prosperous community north of New York City might inspire civility. But the party's sleazy tone is set with the arrival of two young women from an escort service, and bacchanalia spins into tragedy with the murder of the two goons who delivered the girls to Richard's house, and the dreadful repercussions.
In his 17th novel, The Guest Room, Chris Bohjalian (Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls) has written a crime thriller, plus an exploration of family loyalty and moral ambiguity. As readers familiar with Bohjalian's work expect, there's a broader social issue at the heart of his domestic and suspense dramas, in this case sex trafficking: the two young women at Richard's party were kidnapped Armenians, imprisoned by Russian gangsters and brought to the U.S. as sex slaves. The three main characters alternate chapters: Richard; his wife, Kristin; and Alexandra, the young Armenian whose life story illuminates the horror of trafficking.
Less developed characters advance the plot, but the story belongs to the issue of the sex trade. Bohjalian consistently examines social injustice and its victims in his fiction, including the well-intentioned caregiver in Midwives, and the civilian victims of war in Skeletons at the Feast and The Light in the Ruins. In The Guest Room, the characters suffer mightily, but it's Alexandra and her timely plight that will be seared into readers' memories. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco