Box 21 is the story of greed triumphing over innocence, then being destroyed by revenge, only to rise again in another person. It is the story of two teenage girls from Lithuania lured to Sweden by the promise of jobs that paid twenty times what they were making as waitresses in Lithuania. The two men that were helping them would pay for their passports and all the documents they would need to go to Sweden. Of course, since they were only seventeen, the documents would have to be falsified.

Once aboard the ferry that would take them to Stockholm, the men showed their true colors. They raped the girls, telling them they would have to repay them for the fake documents by working for them as prostitutes. The man who would be their pimp took their passports, promising to return them when their debt was repaid.

The girls were then taken to a fancy apartment, where they were locked in with electronic locks. They would have to satisfy twelve customers a day or they would be beaten and raped until they bled. They were to greet the men at the door wearing whatever the men wanted them to wear. Often, they wore nothing. They were required to perform extras, such as being slapped or handcuffed or worse. Three years later, they had figured out they would never be free.

Box 21 was written by two Swedish authors. One, Borge Helstrom, is a former criminal who knows the seamy side of Stockholm all too well. That is the reason the story is so true-to-life. The characters are people you could meet on any street in the world. The plot is not just believable, it is something that actually happens to teenage girls much too often. The language in this book is raw and the violence and sex is graphic; it's an adult book in all senses. But there's still a lesson in here for all teenage girls: that these things can and do happen, even to nice girls, and so they can happen to them.