The Long War Series

They were but children when in 1947 the Soviet Union named the United States as 'the main enemy.’ Spirit Falls is the first novel in Townsend's The Long War series. It is an affecting story of childhood friendship growing into profound love, a coming-of-age novel set in the empty and hardscrabble landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Korean War rages. Marie Jeanne Charbonneau, a French-Canadian, and Ricky Belisle, Serbian and Scots-Irish, befriend one another at the one-room Spirit Falls Graded School on Michigan’s isolated Upper Peninsula, and grow up together wandering the forests, lakes and swamps. As the novel opens, they are in the tenth grade, when children in these isolated rural communities either quit, or moved elsewhere to complete their education. On the eve of the longest night of the year, a stranger appears bringing with her new influences and a longing for the wider world. A Lake Superior storm brings the two teenagers face-to-face with death and the knowledge of good and evil which drives them from Eden into the world. The Long War is about America’s late twentieth century wars and the lives of four children from childhood innocence, their growth into momentary key players in blundering and bloody struggles of their titan twentieth century empires into which they were born. Richard Belisle and his childhood friend, French-Canadian Marie Jeanne Charbonneau, cross paths and swords with Danton Larionov and Ekaterina Soroka, who once had also been children. They trust and betray, give faith and deceive, become fast friends and bitter enemies, each striving to live within a moral code in a 20th century world of contrived and real ambiguity.

Two young people, a brother and sister, die in a freak Lake Superior storm. Ricky Belisle, the accused murderer, is released from jail for lack of evidence. In shame he leaves his hometown to prove himself worthy; worthy of Marie Jeanne, 'M.J.', Charbonneau, his childhood 'buddy'; worthy of his family; worthy of his village. M.J. finds Ricky on a Colorado mountain where the nightmarish night repeats itself. Ricky and M.J. must overcome childhood terrors if they are to save one another. Ricky Belisle travels across the south and west of America, a minor league baseball player, seeking redemption before his family, his people, his Marie Jeanne. It is 1960, the nuclear age. His forebears far into the mists of time––father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and beyond––had been warriors, which the world no longer needs. He encounters temptation and corruption and injustice, a south of explosive rage and hypocrisy. Injury and death lurk under each friendly grin. Within the confines of the baseball stadium is safety and certainty. Baseball rules, if not just, are firm and clear. He suffers a concussion on a run down between third base and home plate. Marie Jeanne finds him on a Colorado mountain, recovering, hardened, where Indifferent nature tests them, their love, their worth, yet again.

The Cold War was joined. Sons will fight. The Long War series is about the sons and daughters; Russ Belisle and M.J. Charbonneau, Danton Larionov and Ekaterina Soroka, children of their nations' greatest generation, born half-worlds apart, come of age each in their small-town Edens, bathed in stories, tales and memory. Each is cast out to stalk one other on the front lines in the war for control of the imagination. They cross paths and cross swords, trust and double-cross, become fast friends and bitter enemies, remain faithful and deceitful, striving to be moral in an immoral world. The Executioner’s Son is the third volume in Townsend's five-book series, The Long War, set against the background of ruse and stratagem between the Soviet Union and the United States. The ...Son 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.’ 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. On Ekaterina's part, she yearns to voyage to the magical kingdom beyond the seventh sea, France or England, or hope beyond hope, America. Danton, the bully, seeks the love of Ekaterina, the storyteller, conflicted in his loyalties, must tread with care. He 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 the crosshairs of his scope.