SYNOPSIS
From the New York Times bestselling author of
Midwives and
The Sandcastle Girls comes the spellbinding tale of a 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.
When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother’s bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
Those women? Two 19-year-olds from Armenia, abducted as teenagers, held captive as sex slaves in Russia throughout their adolescence, and then brought to New York City where the captors know their value as sexual assets will soar.
In the aftermath, Kristin and Richard’s life rapidly spirals into nightmare. The police throw them out of their home, now a crime scene, Richard’s investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave, and Kristin is unsure if she can forgive her husband for the moment he shared with a dark-haired girl in the guest room. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, faces a much graver danger. In one breathless, violent night, she is free, running to escape the police who she fears will arrest her and the gangsters who she knows will kill her.
The novel follows her story as she tries to stay in alive in Times Square and Manhattan with neither credit cards nor a passport — with, essentially, no identity — as well as the entire Chapman family’s saga in Westchester: Richard, Kristin, and 9-year-old Melissa.
A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal,
The Guest Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest storytellers.
One of the issues the novel touches upon is human trafficking and sexual slavery. Want to learn more? Visit the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking.
The reality is that:
- Human trafficking is a $150 billion dollar industry.
- According to the U.S. State Department, perhaps three-quarters of a million people are trafficked across international borders every year – and then there are the millions trafficked within their own countries.
- The International Labor Organization estimates that 14.2 million people are victims of forced labor exploitation in economic activities, such as agriculture, construction, domestic work, and manufacturing. The ILO also estimates 4.5 million people were forced into sexual exploitation globally in 2014.
- About two million children every year are exploited in the global commercial sex trade.
- Women and girls make up 98 percent of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
- The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children estimates that one out of every six runaways is a likely sex trafficking victim.
The Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking is one of the many important organizations that work to assist persons trafficked for the purpose of forced labor, sexual slavery, and other instances of appalling human rights violations. Their web site is:
www.castla.org