Robert Ernest Townsend

The Executioner's Son (eBook, ePUB)

Book Three in the Long War Series

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

It is 1953. Danton Larionov, son of NKVD major Wolf Larionov, lives in Suzdal, ancient Russia's capital and spiritual center. Its medieval fortresses, monasteries, and nunneries are now an NKVD Gulag. Screams punctuate the night. Woman's Wood, a tract of ancient forest, emanates deathly silence. The rasputitsa, Russia's spring thaw, ejects those buried in mass graves, brings the murdered to the surface, as if rejecting Stalin's victims buried with proper rite and ceremony.

An apparition, the fifteen-year-old goose herder, Ekaterina Soroka, appears on Illian Meadow. The all-powerful sixteen-year-old Danton drives off young hoodlums threatening her to claim, a Soviet droit du seigneur, the beautiful stranger for his own amusement, but she transfixed him with a skazka, a tale. All that spring and summer along the banks of the Kamenka River, he attends to her inexhaustible font of tales.

Stalin dies. The executioners are executed. The Soviet prince is laid low. On a autumn day Ekaterina disappears. Danton vows he will seek her if he must search beyond the seventh sea and beyond the seventh kingdom. He joins the Army, an engineer, travels to distant lands--Kiev, Cuba, Laos--in service to the Soviet State, seeking his teller of tales. Then, in a distant forest in a distant land, he discovers not whom he seeks, but the American executioner, US Army sniper, PFC Richard Belisle.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Liar's Path Publishing
• Seitenzahl: 386
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Oktober 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781733882750
• Artikelnr.: 57817781

Autorenporträt

Townsend comes from a long line--father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers--of soldiers, American and pre-American. Slavic on his mother's, deep-south redneck on the father's side, his parents managed money poorly, but told stories well. Spare, pithy, lasting the duration of a Pall Mall cigarette, the tales were to entertain while teaching. No one is completely useless, he was told. He can always serve as a bad example. He learned this lesson--storytellers are treasured, liars are vexing and both are often one and the same. The craft is shared; the objective differs. His stories and novels arise from family history, fables and stories told around the kitchen table as well as his own experi-ences in America's late 20th century ambiguous wars, deceptions and counter-deceptions. Fluent in Russian and German with a combat vocabulary in French, Townsend is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (BA), studied at Freies Universitat Berlin (Certifikat), and awarded his MA (Russian Area Studies) from Georgetown University. Since leaving the intelligence business, he has turned his attention to writing stories and essays, an early pas-sion waylaid by life and work. The Long War is a novel series addressing deception, war and peace in a 20th century world of both contrived and actual moral ambiguity. Townsend and his wife, Patrice Naparstek, live comforta-bly most anywhere--Rovinj, Croatia; Dresden, Germany; Dubai, UAE; Boulder, Colorado; Semur-en-Auxios, France, Madison, Wisconsin--but return periodically to the northern Wisconsin family farm to breathe deeply.