Stealing a Summer's Afternoon — A.J. Sidransky

Elliot Serlin is having the worst week of his life. First, he learns that he has lost his entire savings, including his son's college tuition, to the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Then he stumbles upon a file at work marked SECRET and learns he is going to lose his job. Desperate to avoid financial ruin, and unwilling to tell his wife for fear she'll leave him, Elliot sets out planning an elaborate, if not quite foolproof, art heist. Along the way, he will recruit a salsa-dancing ex-con, a 19-year-old hacker, his best friend, and his wife's best friend who, it turns out, has eyes for him. Not least among the seemingly insurmountable obstacles Elliot must overcome is his own ego. Stealing a Summer's Afternoon is a farcical page-turner that showcases the same storytelling prowess that readers loved in AJ Sidransky's debut novel, Forgiving Maximo Rothman. But Stealing A Summer's Afternoon features much more of Sidransky's prodigious wit than could fit into the sentimental pages of his first novel.