Redemption
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 no one alive can fully explain
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 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 a 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 have imagined.
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. Drawing on the author's own decades inside America's Cold War intelligence apparatus, Redemption is a novel about the wars fought with tanks and the ones fought across kitchen tables — and about what, if anything, redeems either.