Bøker av Robert E Townsend

The Executioner's Son, the third book in a five-book series, The Long War, is set against a background of ruse and stratagem between the Soviet Union and the United States. The novel opens in 1953 in Suzdal, Russia's medieval religious center and ancient capital, now a GULAG. Its former monasteries, nunneries, and fortresses are NKVD prisons. Screams punctuate the night. The spring thaw, the Rasputitsa, extrudes the murdered from the earth. On a spring day, the youthful Danton Larionov, son of NKVD officer, Captain Volk Larionov, encounters thirteen-year-old Ekaterina Soroka, the Ukrainian, on the meadow beneath the Suzdal Kremlin. He forces himself upon her, but she pauses him with a fairy tale. Through the summer as Stalin's death convulses the Soviet Union, she tells him Russian tales, holding him at bay. In the fall, she disappears. Danton, stunned, had fallen in love. A decade later, Danton, rejecting his father's trade and connections, now a Soviet Army engineer, receives a coveted assignment to the Kuibyshev School of Combat Engineering, Moscow. The Director of Deception Studies is one Colonel Alexander Soroka, 'the sorcerer', whose WWII exploits in the arts of misdirection are legendary. Could the storyteller, Ekaterina--the name Soroka is as common in the western Soviet Union as Williams or Smith is in Middle America--have had some connection with the magician? The Russian and Soviet states struggled against tribal loyalty since Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina; Danton had switched tribes, changed loyalty from the security services to the Army. Danton Larionov becomes the master's student to ply this art against the 'main enemy.' It is she. His rekindled love cripples him. He has fallen in love with the daughter of a powerful Communist with influence at the highest levels of the Soviet State. Ekaterina belongs to a powerful Soviet family, but yearns for the kingdom beyond the seventh sea. Her imagination lies in Western Europe, France or England, or hope beyond hope, America. Danton the bully, conflicted in loyalties the bully seeks the love of the Ekaterina the storyteller. Love in Stalin's Soviet Union, is complicated and he must tread with care, but doesn't. He is exiled to a distant land, where, on a flooded Laotian river crossing, the American sniper, SP-4 Richard Belisle, frames him within crosshairs.

The Wounded find Ricky Belisle and Marie-Jeanne Charbonneau have left their remote Lake Superior village, a world circumscribed by Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, the radio, stories told around a kitchen table during winter storms, and such news as an occasional visitor might bring from the city. Marie-Jeanne, younger by months than Ricky, wiser by years, understood that two created such meaning as vague words--love, respect, sharing, kindness--conveyed through shared experience; a cup of coffee, a sunset, a birth. M.J. saw the world built in this order: man and wife, immediate and extended family, community, nation. Richard, however, would be judged worthy by "them," the men in his clan, his tribe, his nation. Yet, truth be told, that wasn't the complete calculation, if calculation there were. In the eyes of most, Ricky had proven himself worthy. It wasn't enough. He would prove himself worthy of his childhood friend by clearing the debt his parents took on for his sin. And, had his priest been wiser or better read, he might have introduced the young man to the teachings of St. Augustine, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet." Ricky Belisle makes his way across the American south seeking redemption and adventure. Soldiering, the family profession, is no longer available; it is the nuclear age. He plays baseball, is jailed, injured, laid low. M.J. finds him on a Colorado mountain recovering from injuries to body and soul. Indifferent nature tests them yet again.

Ricky Belisle is a boy born to first-generation Americans who have migrated north to farm and hold land that cannot be taken away from them.  They bring with them the beliefs, manners and stories of the homeland that they have not occupied and in so doing they create a disconnect in Ricky that forces him to begin the exploration that will eventually take him away from the land that has leached into his bones, that has given him the foundation for how he sees the world.Marie Jeanne Charbonneau, “M.J.”, a French-Canadian tomboy, is his best, his only, friend, who shows Ricky that the world is wider than he thinks and that much of life takes place in the space between the words. Their relationship sparks the hunt for truth within themselves.The gypsy-like refugee Marina Svetaeva, green-eyed, black-haired, beautiful and wounded, a fragment of war-torn Europe, arrives like a visitation of the spirit world.  Her arrival is the beginning of Ricky’s journey.Ricky Belisle, Marie Jeanne Charbonneau and Marina find themselves on the eve of the winter solstice, the coldest, longest night of the year, set on a course that will last until the spring thaw brings with it a cascade of events that ends with Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100 year Lake Superior storm. He wants only for her to survive this catastrophe and for him to find what it means to be a man.Ricky identifies with the land, the source of his strengths and weaknesses, requiring of him those things that he would not require of himself.  He must learn to live with his fear of its darkness, to manage a homeland both harsh and sublime,and learn to leave behind the place both familiar and brutal.cky’s struggle is to sort out what role women play in his life, how an honorable man treats those who are weaker, and how a young mans knows truth––by what he is told or by what he feels.