Sandwiches and Cuckoo Clocks
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REVIEW BY DAVID G. LAGRAFF
I don't know about you, but I read to escape. When the world and its drudgery gets to be too much, I go looking for a good book -- not an easy task. You, too, have probably been suckered in by a great first chapter only to find out the rest of the book is a complete waste of electrons. Not so with Sandwiches and Cuckoo Clocks by Ross Richdale. This one grabbed me right from the start, and mid-way through I knew I'd found an excellent and deeply satisfying read. A commentary on the cruelty of our times and the hope that love can bring to our blighted landscape, Sandwiches is part action story, part wartime romance, a slice-of-life vignette of ordinary people in the author's beloved New Zealand. It's a book that neatly combines all the above and more, a sweeping story that can't be pigeonholed like so many offerings nowadays. Niana Bolsa loses everything in war-torn Kosovo, including her husband. She decides to make a break for the border and freedom with a couple of orphans in tow and takes a bullet for her trouble. The injury terminates her pregnancy, but somehow she makes it across to a sort of dubious freedom. Through the help of various and sundry international agencies, Niana finds a safe haven in New Zealand, a country where nothing ever happens. Employing a little native ingenuity, she opens a sandwich shop across the street from Matt, a jaded guy on the rebound from a bitter high-society marriage gone sour who spends his days repairing and selling old clocks and shilling tourists with fake antiques. Romance should be easy as they begin to chip away at the walls they've each erected around their private inner hells, but there's a problem. With the war criminal trials heating up, it seems Niana has become something of an obstacle to certain Serbian terrorist groups. She's an eyewitness to the kinds of things we in polite society prefer to believe don't exist. So it comes as no surprise when Niana's dark past explodes to life with the appearance of deadly assassins, hardened men who arrive to clean up loose ends. And who's going to stop them? A woman who sells sandwiches? Some old guy who repairs clocks? I won't reveal more, but if you're looking for a great book, you've found one. Unfettered by the demands of budgets and boardrooms that stifle so many potential authors into straightjacket genre productions, Ross Richdale delivers a read in which you can simply lose yourself and have a great time. If the e-book revolution is about anything, it's about the scrapping of traditional formulas in favor of new and delightful cross-genre explorations such as Sandwiches and Cuckoo Clocks. David G. LaGraff is the free-spirited author of five cutting-edge novels of love, passion and elegant revenge currently under contract at Wordbeams.com. You can contact him at dlagraff@concentric.net.
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