Book

New Novel “Those Kept Close” Follows Two Portland Families From Immigrant Roots to the Halls of Congress

October 23, 2026

Debut novelist and longtime Washington insider Stan Turesky launches a multi-book saga with the story of Peyton Fox, Portland golden boy, Navy SEAL, and reluctant candidate for Congress

PORTLAND, Maine (July 21, 2026). Debut novelist Stan Turesky, whose career has taken him through the corridors of the Maine State Legislature, the U.S. House and Senate, and Washington’s lobbying world, draws on decades of firsthand political experience for “Those Kept Close: The Life and Times of Peyton Fox,” the first installment of a planned multi-book saga.

The novel opens generations before its central character is born, tracing one Portland family from the arrival of a young Irish immigrant, Alice Sullivan, through the decades that follow, as her descendants build lives, careers, and complicated loyalties between Maine and the nation’s capital. That inheritance, of ambition, sacrifice, and unspoken expectation, lands squarely on the shoulders of Peyton Fox.

Growing up on the Portland waterfront, Peyton is the kind of kid other parents point to: a star quarterback and honor-roll student who also happens to have a singing voice good enough to steal a high school stage. But adolescence tests him just as hard as it rewards him. A sophomore-year injury ends his football career and pushes him toward the chorus instead of the debate team; his first serious romance is shadowed by a friend’s family tragedy, and looming over all of it is a quieter pressure: three generations of Navy men, including his own father, an admiral, expect him to follow the family’s uniform into service.

He does. The Naval Academy leads to a commission, and the commission leads to nearly a decade as an officer and a Navy SEAL, a career capped by a covert, high-stakes overseas mission that goes badly wrong. Fox survives, but not without cost: serious combat wounds, a citation for valor, and a stretch of trauma-driven amnesia that forces him to relearn pieces of his own past before he can move forward with it.

Reorganizing his life back in Portland, Fox resigns his commission, earns his law degree, and rebuilds himself as a civilian, a working attorney, a rekindled romance with his high school girlfriend, and, for the first time since he was a teenager, a life that belongs to him rather than to family tradition. It doesn’t last. When the ailing congressman who has represented the district for years is diagnosed with cancer and asks Fox directly to seek his seat, old ties resurface fast: his sister and brother-in-law’s Washington connections, his grandfather’s law partners, and a hometown network that has been quietly watching him his whole life. Within a single election cycle, the man who tried to leave politics behind becomes a freshman member of Congress.

“Those Kept Close” is as much about the private cost of public service as it is about the public life itself, what a family asks of its most capable member, and what that member has to give up and gain to answer the call. Turesky, who has spent his career on the inside of both congressional offices and campaign war rooms, brings an insider’s eye to Fox’s transformation from athlete to warrior to lawyer to legislator, without losing sight of the Portland streets, the Casco Bay waterfront, and the tight-knit community that shaped him.

Book One closes with Fox newly sworn in and Washington still mostly a mystery to him. Subsequent volumes will follow his rise through the House and Senate and, ultimately, into the White House, continuing the multi-generational story of a Portland family whose reach extends from Munjoy Hill to the halls of the Capitol.

About the Author

Stan Turesky has been engaged in government affairs since high school in Portland, Maine, where he grew up on Munjoy Hill. He began his career as a college intern in the Maine State Legislature’s research office and worked on political campaigns throughout high school, college, and graduate school. He earned a doctorate in political science from Brown University, where his dissertation examined the evolving role of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from the chairmanship of Henry Cabot Lodge to that of J. William Fulbright.

Turesky went on to hold senior positions in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. His extensive career as a Washington lobbyist has included assignments for federal agencies, museums, corporations, trade associations, foreign governments, and nonprofit organizations. “Those Kept Close” draws on that decades-long vantage point inside the American government to tell the story of a family and a country navigating the personal costs of public service.

He and his wife, Gerry Otremba, divide their time between rural Maryland and Washington, D.C. “Those Kept Close: The Life and Times of Peyton Fox” is his debut novel and the first book in a planned series.