You Won't Let Me Finish

the long version

The scene is Helsinki's splendid harbour overlooked by a South American Embassy where the Ambassador carries out his ambassadorial duties. Every human drama in the calendar takes place at some time or another in the small cosmos he surveys, including the one that begins on his own front doorstep in the pale early light of a new day. It involves a kind old Russian who befriends drop-outs; a red-headed cosmetic demonstrator from New England on a business tour of Northern Europe; an English business executive turned street busker with a missing ear; and a wild Lapp reindeer farmer from the Arctic Circle who is becoming Americanized. None of it need have happened if the Lapp had not lost his nerve about the fortune he was carrying in a plastic bag, but why he did so and what the consequences were will provide Joan Fleming's many fans with one of the best and brightest of her scintillating entertainments.