MOVING DAY

A bogus moving contractor meets his match in the Holocaust survivor whose household goods he pilfers.

Stanley Peke should have trusted his instincts. They told him that the guys packing his belongings for a move across the country to Santa Barbara were a day early. When another set of movers arrives the next day to an empty house, Peke, retired from his own chemical company, and his wife, Rose, realize that the smiling crew who loaded furniture, papers and family photographs into a big white truck the day before has driven off with virtually everything they owned. Their insurance will cover the financial loss, and their bank accounts will keep them afloat, but that’s not enough for Peke, who moves stealthily but rapidly when he sees an unexpected chance to get a line on the crooks’ whereabouts. With the help of his son, Daniel, who’s taken over the company he founded, and his old friend Itzhak, another survivor of the camps, he traces Nick Pelletiere and his accomplices to Great Falls, Mont., and helps himself to his belongings while they’re away robbing another victim. Case closed, he thinks. But Nick, who considers those post-impressionist paintings and Louis XIV armchairs his personal property, isn’t any more likely than Peke was to take this outrage lying down, and his counterstrike ups the stakes considerably and sends both antagonists down a road from which there’s no return.

As tightly plotted as Stone’s first four novels (Parting Shot, 2006, etc.) but with a much stronger rooting interest in a geezer hero who ends up reaching into himself more deeply and disturbingly than he could have imagined.