FROM THE INTERIOR: “THE GUEST ROOM”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by A Daily Rhythm.

Today’s feature is an e-ARC that I am eager to dive into.  It will be released on January 5, 2016.

The Guest Room, by Chris Bohjalian, is a 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.

 

 

 

Intro:  Richard Chapman presumed there would be a stripper at his brother Philip’s bachelor party.  Perhaps if he had actually thought about it, he might even have expected two.  Sure, in sitcoms the stripper always arrived alone, but he knew that in real life strippers often came in pairs.  How else could there be a little pretend (or not pretend) girl-on-girl action on the living room carpet?  Besides, he worked in mergers and acquisitions, he understood the exigencies of commerce as well as anyone:  two strippers meant you could have two gentlemen squirming at once.  You could have two girls hovering just above two sets of thighs—or if the girls saw the right combination of neediness and dollar signs in the men’s eyes, not hovering but in fact descending upon each of the men’s laps.  Richard wasn’t especially wild about the idea of an exotic dancer in his family’s living room:  there was a place for everything in his mind, even the acrobatically tensed sinews of a stripper.  But that place wasn’t his home….

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Teaser:  “No one knows what we look like.”

“The men at the party do!”  I told her, and I thought of the faces I could remember.  I thought of the bachelor’s brother.  Richard.  I thought of the bedroom upstairs where we went. (68%).

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Blurb:  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.

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 will arrest her and the gangsters who will kill her in a heartbeat. A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal, The Guest Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest storytellers.

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What do you think?  Do these lines capture your interest?  Would you keep reading?

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