The Guest Room is a 2016 psychological thriller novel by Chris Bohjalian.
The Party: Richard Chapman agrees to host a bachelor party for his younger brother at his upscale Westchester home while his wife, Kristin, and daughter are away.
The Incident: The party turns violent when two young women, who were brought there by force as sex slaves, kill their Russian bodyguards and flee into the night.
The Fallout: Richard’s home becomes a crime scene, he is placed on indefinite leave from his investment banking firm, and his marriage falls apart because of a brief, intimate encounter he shared with one of the women in his guest room.
The Escape: The story shifts between Richard trying to salvage his life and Alexandra (Anahit), a 19-year-old Armenian woman running from both the police and the deadly Russian mob.
The book provides a look at the violence and degradation associated with modern global sex slavery.
YES ➙ I do see that zero female authors are featured. For the past 20 years I’ve made an effort to read as many or more female authors, yet none of their series have yet made my list.
I’m young. 😀 There’s still time for me to ADD more to this list.
Leave a comment if I’ve obviously missed one of the best.
ASSuME this is a novel mocking the current far-right tradwife political push. Part of Trump’s Project 2025, for example.
You’d be wrong as I was.
About half way through, I realized it was something like a Stephen King horror.
Trad Wife (2026) follows Jenny Kaplan, a disgraced journalist desperate to resurrect her career.
She travels to the isolated, 300-acre Black Swan Farm in Pennsylvania to write a scathing, undercover exposé on Mia Wright—the internet’s reigning “trad wife” queen who flaunts a flawless, curated life of pastoral bliss, from-scratch meals, and seven perfect children.
What starts as a standard journalistic takedown quickly descends into a surreal, modern gothic nightmare.
Jenny realizes there is a genuinely sinister, suffocating supernatural presence inside the farmhouse.
As the days blur together, Jenny begins suffering from severe memory lapses, unexplained hair loss, and terrifying nightmares of something slithering into her room …
Personally, I support a woman’s right to being a stay-at-home wife or a stay-at-home mother — if her finances and support system allow it. Increasingly difficult in 2026.
Many stay-at-home women are not white nor politically right wing, of course.
The sixth book in her highly popular, long-running Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.
The story opens during a grim Christmas season. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner and a consulting pathologist for the FBI, is called to New York City’s Central Park. A naked woman’s body has been discovered propped against a fountain in the freezing cold.
Scarpetta immediately recognizes the gruesome trademark methods—including a specific gunshot wound and excised sections of skin—of her elusive nemesis, the brilliant serial killer Temple Brooks Gault.
As more victims emerge, including a transit officer in a subway tunnel, Scarpetta realizes that Gault’s trail of violence is a personal game intentionally designed to lure and destroy her. The novel reaches an electrifying, high-tech climax within the dark, menacing labyrinth of the New York City subway system.
Temple Brooks Gault is one of the more terrifying villains in fiction.
I was impressed how they adapted the LONG, SILLY, CONFUSING ancient Greek epic poem watchable by a modern audience.
It doesn’t look an A.I. monstrosity. Director Nolan prefers practical, “old school” in-camera special effects over CGI.
Modern language, American accents, and profanity are a bit shocking at first. But I got used to it.
Cast is great: Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, alongside Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Tom Holland (Telemachus), Robert Pattinson (Antinous), Zendaya (Athena), and Charlize Theron (Calypso).
The blind friend and servant Eumaeus, played by John Leguizamo is particularly interesting and original.
A massive portion of this success is driven by the audio format. The series has accumulated over 140 million hours of listening time through Soundbooth Theater and Audible. The audio book reader is great ➙ Jeff Hays.
An alien corporation instantly flattens every man-made structure on Earth, killing billions of people indoors.
The remaining survivors are herded into a massive, 18-level subterranean dungeon.
This dungeon operates as a sadistic, televised intergalactic reality game show watched by trillions of aliens across the universe.
To survive, the “crawlers” must fight monsters, level up their stats, find gear, and entertain the bloodthirsty audience to gain sponsors
Carl: A 27-year-old Coast Guard veteran who enters the dungeon wearing nothing but boxer shorts, a leather jacket, and no shoes—accompanied by an incredibly snarky AI that has a strange obsession with his bare feet.
Princess Donut: His ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning Persian show cat. After consuming a magical pet biscuit early on, she gains human-level sentience, the ability to speak, and becomes a powerful, spell-slinging diva
Why is Carl with his ex-girlfriend’s fussy cat? Prior to writing the series, Matt Dinniman had made his living going to cat shows and drawing illustrations of cats for their owners. When Covid hit, those cat shows were cancelled, so he spent his time writing.
