Book details

  • Genre:fiction
  • Sub-genre:Thrillers / Military
  • Language:English
  • Series Title:The Long War
  • Series Number:5
  • Pages:280
  • Paperback ISBN:9798992917543

Redemption

By Robert E. Townsend

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Overview

The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Soviet Union is dissolving. And in Yugoslavia, the peace enforced by fifty years of communism is unraveling into the oldest kind of war—neighbor against neighbor, village against village—over grievances unforgotten, unforgiven. Spanning Paris, Moscow, Washington, the Michigan Northwoods, and a Yugoslavia in flames, "Redemption" follows one American family and the people swept into its orbit through the final collapse of the old-world order—and the private reckonings, forgivable and not, that outlast it.
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Description

The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Soviet Union is dissolving. And in Yugoslavia, the peace enforced by fifty years of communism is unraveling into the oldest kind of war—neighbor against neighbor, village against village—over grievances unforgotten and unforgiven. Colonel Richard Belisle has spent a career reading battlefields the Pentagon refuses to see—first in the Cold War's shadow armies, now in a country tearing itself apart along its oldest scars. His family carries its own fault lines, inherited from a grandfather who arrived in postwar Berlin as an American PFC and left it a wheeler-dealer with secrets of his own. A French wife who married Richard with her eyes open, a daughter, an Army lieutenant, recovering from wounds no one will fully explain, and a past that keeps resurfacing in letters postmarked Moscow. State Department officer Jon Einarsson has orbited the Belisles for twenty years—through Berlin, through broken engagement, through the Gulf War victory parade in Washington—always a half-step outside the family he can't stop loving. When the colonel's fierce, unpredictable daughter Murielle pulls him back into their orbit, Jon finds himself caught between duty and the woman he has never quite let go of. And from Moscow to Bosnia, Ekaterina Soroka—a Russian woman who fled the Ten-Day War with nothing but a suitcase and a fountain pen—is carrying a secret that will bind her to the Belisles more permanently than she could ever imagine. Spanning Paris, Moscow, Washington, the Michigan Northwoods, and a Yugoslavia in flames, "Redemption" follows one American family and the people swept into its orbit through the final collapse of the old-world order—and the private reckonings, forgivable and not, that outlast it.
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About The Author

Robert Townsend comes from a long line of soldiers—American and pre-American, Slavic on his mother's side and Deep South on his father's. His people managed money poorly but told stories well. Around the kitchen table on an isolated Wisconsin farm, he learned the family trade early: storytelling. Storytellers are treasured, liars are vexing, and both are often the same. The craft is shared. The objectives differ, and that distinction would occupy the rest of his life. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1969—at the height of the Vietnam War protests—Townsend flew 130 combat missions in Southeast Asia. He left Vietnam in late 1970 having watched the most powerful lessons of his career take shape: a storyteller armed with the right narrative could hide even the most massive graves. He spent the next two decades in the architecture of deception itself. He served in Berlin, at the National Security Agency at Fort George Meade, and as a war planner at HQ Air Forces in Europe in Ramstein, Germany. In the 1980s, he was Deputy Chief of the Air Force Intelligence Agency's Counter-Deception Directorate—one of a small number of Americans professionally immersed in the shadow war of ruse and stratagem between the United States and the Soviet Union. He is fluent in Russian and German, holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin, a Zertifikat from Freie Universität Berlin, and an MA from Georgetown University. He has lived and worked in Rovinj, Croatia; Dresden, Germany; Dubai; Boulder, Colorado; and Madison, Wisconsin, returning periodically to his family farm in northern Wisconsin—where, over the past twenty years, he had planted over 80,000 tamarack, pine, and spruce, Since leaving the intelligence world, Townsend has turned to an early passion laid by life and work: fiction. The series draws on forty years of firsthand experience with the deception doctrine, proxy wars, and moral ambiguities that define the twentieth century's most dangerous standoff. Now, Townsend and his wife, Patrice Naparstek, live on a small farm in the Côte d'Or, France. To learn more about intelligence history, Cold War analysis, and the ongoing story behind his novels, visit LiarsPath.com.
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