Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Hello everyone. Today I am reviewing Moving Day by Jonathan Stone for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book (from the publisher): 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, 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 with Peke’s brutal, unresolved past.

My review: Let me just say it. I loved this book. I was caught up in the plot immediately. Stone’s creation, the character of Stanley Peke, is a successful business man who is multi-layered, complicated, driven, and haunted by his past. When Peke first realizes that he has been fooled, that a scam has taken away everything he has worked to accumulate – the possessions that are not just things, but talismans, treasures that define the life he desperately needed to create in a new country – he knows that he must get them back. How he gets them back and the inevitable confrontation that must ensue is what fuels the rest of the story.

The suffering and brutality and loss that Peke was subject to as a child, the horrors he witnessed, have never fully been resolved. This invasion, this theft of all of his possessions becomes much more than a simple act of betrayal. It’s a game changer for everyone involved.

Stone is a wonderful writer. He takes us on the journey that Peke must inevitably take, a journey that involves a final confrontation with both his enemy and his own demons. It’s simply riveting.

Stone knows how to build suspense, to drive the story in a way that locks the reader in, hanging on tight, not wanting to put the book down. His words create time and place vividly. I was immersed in the world created on the pages of Moving Day. I couldn’t put it down.

I think you’ll really enjoy this mystery/thriller. I sure did.

About the author: Jonathan Stone writes his books on the commuter train from his home in Connecticut to his advertising job in midtown Manhattan. Honing his writing skills by creating smart and classic campaigns for high-level brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Mitsubishi has paid off, as Stone’s first mystery-thriller series, the Julian Palmer books, won critical acclaim and was hailed as “stunning” and “risk-taking” in Publishers Weekly starred reviews. He earned glowing praise for his novel The Cold Truth from the New York Times, which called it “bone-chilling.” He’s the recipient of the Claymore Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel and a graduate of Yale, where he was a Scholar of the House in fiction writing.

Good news! One of you will be the winner of a copy of Moving Day. Just leave a comment on this post and I will pick a winner on Sunday.

Happy Wednesday.