$4.99
Moving Day: A Thriller [Kindle Edition]
Product Description
I recently made a coast-to-coast cross-country move. I distinctly remember the unusually hot and muggy day in May when a team of friendly and professional movers took all my worldly possessions and skillfully packed them into an 18-wheeler. I remember thinking: what if I never see this truck again?
That's exactly what happens to Stanley Peke in Jonathan Stone's riveting crime thriller, Moving Day. The premise is elegantly simple: a slick scam where fake movers arrive a day early and steal all your belongings. The execution by Stone is expertly done: I found myself flipping pages faster than a semitruck on a dark, straight highway.
At its core, Moving Day is a cat-and-mouse game between 72-year-old Stanley, who is about to embark on his golden years after a lifetime of hard work, and Nick, a clever con man who thinks through every detail. For Nick, the Peke heist is just the most recent of many. After all, he thinks retirees are easy targets—they collect on their insurance and move on.
Not Stanley. He wants his things back. He has lost everything before, and he doesn't plan to again. Even if it means tracking criminals to a remote barn in Montana with only a rusty spade to clear his way.
Thankfully, the moving truck with my belongings did show up in Seattle a few weeks later, everything intact and accounted for. In Stanley's case, things don't go quite as smoothly: his path is filled with haunting memories and dead bodies, past and present. But after he travels on this harsh and at times poignant journey, it ultimately offers him redemption.
That's exactly what happens to Stanley Peke in Jonathan Stone's riveting crime thriller, Moving Day. The premise is elegantly simple: a slick scam where fake movers arrive a day early and steal all your belongings. The execution by Stone is expertly done: I found myself flipping pages faster than a semitruck on a dark, straight highway.
At its core, Moving Day is a cat-and-mouse game between 72-year-old Stanley, who is about to embark on his golden years after a lifetime of hard work, and Nick, a clever con man who thinks through every detail. For Nick, the Peke heist is just the most recent of many. After all, he thinks retirees are easy targets—they collect on their insurance and move on.
Not Stanley. He wants his things back. He has lost everything before, and he doesn't plan to again. Even if it means tracking criminals to a remote barn in Montana with only a rusty spade to clear his way.
Thankfully, the moving truck with my belongings did show up in Seattle a few weeks later, everything intact and accounted for. In Stanley's case, things don't go quite as smoothly: his path is filled with haunting memories and dead bodies, past and present. But after he travels on this harsh and at times poignant journey, it ultimately offers him redemption.
Forty years’ accumulation of art, antiques, and family photographs are more than just objects for Stanley Peke—they are proof of a life fully lived. A life he could have easily lost long ago.
When a con man steals his houseful of possessions in a sophisticated moving-day scam, Peke wanders helplessly through his empty New England home, inevitably reminded of another helpless time: decades in Peke’s past, a cold and threadbare Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz eked out a desperate existence in the war-torn Polish countryside, subsisting on scraps and dodging Nazi soldiers. Now, the seventy-two-year-old Peke—who survived, came to America, and succeeded—must summon his original grit and determination to track down the thieves, retrieve his things, and restore the life he made for himself.
Peke and his wife, Rose, trace the path of the thieves’ truck across America, to the wilds of Montana, and to an ultimate, chilling confrontation with not only the thieves but also with Peke’s brutal, unresolved past.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review: Crisp, elegant prose distinguishes this exceptional crime thriller from Stone (Parting Shots). Nick, an accomplished grifter, preys on the elderly, but he grossly underestimates 72-year-old Stanley Peke, who plans to move to Santa Barbara, Calif., with his wife after 40 years in Westchester, N.Y. The day before the real moving men are due, Nick and his team arrive at the Pekes’ house “in crisp green uniforms, an immense white truck behind them.” The physically robust Stanley has started to forget little things, like where he puts his keys or his wallet, so he assumes he has the date wrong. After packing up and loading the Pekes’ possessions in the white truck, Nick and crew head for Montana. This betrayal brings back memories of Stanley’s horrific boyhood in Poland escaping the Nazis. With steely resolve, he sets out on a cross-country road trip to retrieve his stolen property. Readers will cheer this unlikely hero every step of the way. Jill Marr, Sandra Djikstra Literary Agency. (May)
From Library Journal
Starred Review: A scam, as slick as it is heartbreaking, binds the lives of two men in this cerebral thriller. When 72-year-old Stanley Peke and his wife Rose move from their longtime Westchester, NY, home to retirement in Santa Barbara, CA, the moving crew arrives a day earlier than expected, and the next morning—when their real movers arrive—the couple find that everything they own has been stolen. Despite his having insurance coverage, Peke—a Polish Holocaust survivor born Stanislaw Pecoskowitz—is taken back to the terrible loss he suffered as a seven-year-old child. And he wants his things back. When he realizes that the thief also got the key to his safe-deposit box, Peke devises a way to locate his belongings and retrieve them. Peke has not only the will but the resources to follow through with his plan, but he underestimates the resolve of ringleader Nick Pelletiere, as events turn dangerous, even deadly. While Stone’s exploration of the inner lives of his two adversaries occasionally slows his narrative, he takes readers on a spellbinding ride. VERDICT From the author of the Julian Palmer series (The Cold Truth; Parting Shot), this is a compelling mystery with a moral foundation.
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