Old Friends - Softcover

Distel, Edward C

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798235705357

Publisher: Edward Distell, 2026

Synopsis

A president's rise looks inevitable - until someone starts asking who built it.

Martin Rourke came from nowhere: no machine, no money, no favors owed. That was the story. But when a Senate committee quietly opens a file on a foreign shipping conglomerate, a fiduciary firm in London, and a decades-old network of "old friends" first drawn together during the Suez crisis of 1967, the story starts to come apart at the seams.

As journalist Mara follows the money and committee counsel Corbett tries to keep the inquiry alive without becoming the story himself, Old Friends moves between a chartering room in 1967 London and the corridors of power today - tracing how a fortune built on tankers and timing quietly financed a presidency, and what happens when the architecture behind the man in office finally comes into view.

Power didn't find Martin Rourke. It was built for him.

About this title

About the Author

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edward Distell
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798235705357
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 520