Having sold his mutual fund analysis company to America's largest brokerage firm, he feels that for him it's "pay-back" time to society, and so he chooses Albania on which to bestow his altruistic Yankee know-how.
Yet this multi-layered roller-coaster of a novel spanning the high desert of New Mexico to the cities of London, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Tirana carries a tender humorous edge. It's also the story of Toledo's grandmother, Grace Templeton - it's her tale of autumnal love in a retirement home where the octogenarian inhabitants are more at home around the poker table than in any communal dining room. And in a denouement of the most ironic kind, it is Grace who is swept along by this wave of idealism and transformed from the queen of the cards to the Queen of Albania.
