Chris Bohjalian, THE GUEST ROOM

This is certainly a disturbing book. The premise: a wealthy man, husband/father of a daughter, in Bronxville, NYC (a bedroom community for Manhattan; much of the action takes place very close to where I used to live) agrees to throw his younger brother a bachelor party, including two strippers. Except they're sex slaves, and one kills the two Russian handlers who are there at the party. Told in alternating chapters, third-person POV Richard and first-person Alexandria (one of the women), it's a compelling social comment about the white slave trade and how its violence can intrude so quickly (because it's just not that far away, even in Bronxville). The plot moves quickly from point to point. My difficulty was that there was not much (if any) character development arc; people remained largely unchanged, with the exception, perhaps, of his daughter who has her eyes opened to a horrible reality of our world.