The Guest Room

October 19, 2015
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.

November 1, 2015
Bohjalian's latest ripped-from-the-headlines cautionary tale concerns a very poorly planned bachelor party. Richard Chapman, a middle-aged investment banker with a lower Manhattan firm, makes one mistake that will upend his life: he hosts a bachelor party at his suburban Bronxville home for his feckless younger brother, Philip, manager of a boutique hotel in Chelsea. Richard's wife, Kristin, a good sport about the impending high jinks, is spending the weekend at her mother's in Manhattan with their 9-year-old daughter, Melissa, to allow the boys to be boys. Although he was expecting a stripper, Richard definitely failed to anticipate that the entertainment procured by Philip's hotelier friends would actually be two possibly underage Russian girls and their menacing bodyguards, who forbid the men to take cellphone pictures but encourage everything else. Soon the high jinks are devolving into an outright orgy. As the men take turns with one of the girls, Sonja, the other, Alexandra, takes Richard up to the guest room, where he declines to do more than talk. Alternating with the narratives of Richard and his family is Alexandra's chronicle of her enslavement. After her mother dies, the talented young dancer is tricked by a trusted family friend, who arranges for her to travel from her native Armenia to Moscow--for a ballet audition, she thinks. Instead, she's raped and then trafficked in Russia until she's 19, when she is removed, along with Sonja and another girl, Crystal, to New York. At the party, Sonja, who knows that the guards, Pavel and Kirill, murdered Crystal, fatally stabs Pavel with one of Kristin's butcher knives. Kirill is shot and killed in the fray, and the girls escape. From there the plot thickens with blackmail threats, Internet defamation, employment discrimination, and marital meltdown, as Richard compounds his original error with even more implausible lapses in judgment. Character development takes a back seat in this expose of human trafficking, and Bohjalian's treatment often wavers between prurience and polemic. A compulsively readable train wreck.

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November 1, 2015
Upstanding husband and father Richard Chapman sends his wife and their young daughter off to her mother's in Manhattan so that he can, reluctantly, use their upscale suburban home to host a bachelor party for his younger brother. And while Richard knows that there is the potential for things to get a little wild and crazy, he is catapulted into another stratosphere altogether when the strippers hired for the evening murder their Russian bodyguards in Richard's tastefully furnished living room. Interwoven with Richard's story of a marriage sent crashing to the rocks and a CEO-track banking career in peril is the tale of Alexandra, an Armenian teenager who recounts the diabolical workings of the Russian sex-slave industry. As the tension on both fronts escalates into blackmail, revenge, and violence, the always gripping Bohjalian (Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, 2014) offsets the fireworks by bathing all parties in the most sympathetic light. Venturing into crime-thriller territory familiar to fans of Harlan Coben, Bohjalian's page-turner about an average Joe caught up in sordid events beyond his control resonates with chilling plausibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2015

In another fresh and different novel from the New York Times best-selling Bohjalian, Richard Chapman was prepared for a mess when he opens his home to his younger brother's bachelor party. But he wasn't expecting an intimate moment with one of the women hired as entertainment before she and her coworker (both naked) stab their Russian bodyguards to death and flee into the night. Richard is tossed from his crime-scene house by the police, put on indefinite leave by his investment bank, and cold-shouldered by his wife, and that's just the beginning in this tale of escalating suspense.

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