Robert E Townsend

Spirit Falls / Ledokhod Robert E Townsend

Spirit Falls/Ledokhod, a dual-language Russian-English publication, is the first novel in "The Long War", a five-novel series played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. On the coldest night of that winter the gypsy-like refugee Marina unexpectedly joins Ricky Belisle and Marie Jeanne, "M. J.", Charbonneau at curtain call on the night of their school's Christmas program. Her arrival looses a cascade of events that ultimately finds Ricky carrying M. J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100-year Lake Superior storm. If she survives he vows an ultimate sacrifice. In 1947, the Soviet security services named the United States as 'the main enemy.' The Cold War was joined. Four teens, born half-worlds apart, children of their nations' greatest generation, come of age in the 1950s, each in their small-town Eden, cast out to encounter one another on the front lines in a war to control the imagination. The series follows the lives of four young people seeking truth using what tools they had: language, stories, and history. None is a poet studied in the nuance of the word though one is a singer-songwriter, another a linguist, the third a soldier, and the fourth a Soviet intelligence deception specialist. None wishes to lie but lie they must. The four main characters: Two Russians; Danton Larionov and Ekaterina Soroka, an American; Richard Belisle, and a Canadian; Marie Jeanne Charbonneau, cross paths, destinies, and swords as they stalk, deceive and love across the world. They trust and double-cross, are fast friends and bitter enemies, give faith and deceive while striving to live within moral codes in an amoral world. The Long War is a novel series addressing deception, war and peace in the 20th century world of both contrived and actual moral ambiguity.