THE GUEST ROOM

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.