The Guest Room in less skilled hands than Chris Bohjalian's could have been a real mess but he handled it very well, if you can say that about sex slavery. The thriller begins with a bachelor party that Richard Chapman holds in his home in Westchester for his younger brother, whose "friend" has hired some stripper entertainment. The men are thrilled when two young "girls" show up and put on quite the show that becomes, shall I say, "hands on." Richard gets so drunk that he finds himself in a compromising position, which is unlike him, the straight arrow guy married to the love of his life and the father of a sweet little girl.
But that is the tip of the iceberg. One of the girls grabs a knife in the ktichen and kills one of the two bodyguards. Next, gun shots are heard, and the second bodyguard is dead. The partiers are in fear of their own lives, but what they don't yet know is that the "girls" are sex slaves who are eager to escape their captors.
Richard's wife is devastated not only by her husband's failure in his character but also by the damage to their home and their reputations. She's not even sure she can continue the marriage at this point. His daughter Melissa is just old enough to make sense of some of the goings-on includng the term "sex slave."
As for the young women now on the run, they manage to escape both the Russians and the police as they divide up and use their tips and the money they took from the deceased bodyguards to stay in hotels. They plan to get far away to Los Angeles but they want the heat to die down first.
Chris Bohjalian keeps the pages turning in this crime thriller. He is the author of 20 novels including Midwives (1997), The Sandcastle Girls (2012), and The Flight Attendant (2018). Three of his novels are in devlopment for films -- The Sandcastle Girls, The Sleepwalker, and The Flight Attendant.
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