Captain P. T. Deutermann, USN (ret.) “was commissioned in 1963 at Annapolis into the surface line, where he was ordered to the new destroyer USS Morton (DD-948). He served in Morton for two years, and was onboard for the second Gulf of Tonkin incident in September,1964, which precipitated the first significant aircraft carrier strikes against North Vietnam.

Following his tour in Morton, Captain P. T. Deutermann was assigned to class 13 of the destroyer department head school in Newport, Rhode Island. Upon graduation he was diverted from the destroyer forces to Coronado, California, to train in the new Swift class gunboats. Upon completion of training, he went to Manila, Philippine Islands, as officer in charge of a mobile training team which trained Philippine navy crews to use Swift boats against the pirates plaguing Manila Bay and the waters off Corregidor. From Manila, he went in-country Vietnam as officer in charge of PCF-39, based at the mouth of the main Mekong river channel that led up to Saigon. After a year there, he was assigned as operations officer in USS Hull (DD-945), which operated intermittently for the next two years off the coasts of North and South Vietnam providing naval gunfire support for Army and marine forces ashore.”

Between 1972 and 1976, Captain P. T. Deutermann attended the Naval War College and was assigned to the Pentagon. For the next thirteen years he would work in a variety of assignments, including in 1985 “command of Destroyer Squadron 25, based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for two years, during which he made one deployment to the Indian Ocean, where he visited Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, and Japan.” Captain P. T. Deutermann “retired from active duty after 26 years in 1989 with nineteen military awards and decorations.”

Captain P. T. Deutermann is the author of The Firefly; The Moonpool; Hunting Season; The Edge of Honor; Scorpion in the Sea; The Cat Dancers; Sweepers; Spider Mountain; Zero Option; Official Privilege; Train Man; Darkside; and, Nightwalkers.

Publisher’s Weekly said of Darkside, “This gripping mystery by the author of Hunting Season offers a memorable-if slightly improbable-account of some creepy goings-on at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. As the book opens, the school is buzzing with the news that a plebe has plummeted from a sixth-story window and died. Amid questions of suicide, a new twist emerges: the plebe was wearing a pair of panties belonging to Midshipman First Class Julie Markham, a perky senior at the academy and an acquaintance of the dead plebe, who then gets drawn into the investigation. Her father, a retired former fighter pilot and academy history professor, hires crack defense lawyer Liz DeWinter, fearing that Markham will somehow be scapegoated by the Navy Criminal Investigation Service as officers try to hush up scandal and save their own careers. Meanwhile, academy security chief Jim Hall begins probing the case on his own. After another death, it looks like there's a killer on the loose; some wild, murderous chases ensue in the academy's underground tunnels, while sparks fly between DeWinter and Markham's widower father. Veteran mystery novelist Deutermann, a graduate of the naval academy and retired captain, paints a detailed picture of the lives of midshipmen-including their rigorous education, strict honor code and suspicion of officers (referred to collectively as the "Dark Side")-as well as the inner workings of navy bureaucracy; the smart characters and deft plotting make up for some minor inconsistencies. Readers with navy backgrounds will naturally gravitate toward Deutermann's latest, but other mystery fans will find the story thoroughly absorbing as well.

Kirkus Reviews said of Train Man, “Another solid performance from Deutermann (Zero Option, 1998, etc.), this time about a train-hating, vengeance-hungry madman and the FBI agents seeking to derail him. At FBI headquarters, they'd begun calling the operation ``Trainman,'' though at first something with ``Bridges'' in it would have worked as well, because it looked as if bridges were the target. Spanning the Mississippi, there are only six of them, and when two were blown to bits, the police and the FBI leapt to conclusions understandable enough though wrong. But agents Hush Hanson and Carolyn Lang widened their scope freight trains had also been demolished. And pretty soon the investigators had reasons to desert another early theory: maybe it wasn't just terrorist groups they ought to be looking at. Maybe a single terrorist working alone was their target someone handy with explosives and with a deep grudge that had festered into obsession. Meanwhile, at an army depot in Alabama, another harrowing problem was shaping up. A military train with a mysterious, potentially deadly, increasingly unstable cargo was heading west, for the Mississippi, for one of the bridges likely to be a terrorist's target. Out in the field, Hanson and Lang have all this heaped on their plates, plus an extra dollop or two from FBI politics. They have enough enemies of their own, highly placed people skilled at the game of backstabbing, to make it difficult to know who to trust and sometimes even whether they can trust each other. And yet, unmistakably, a feeling seems to be growing between the shy, unsure (in his relationships with women) Hanson and the attractive if somewhat hard-bitten Lang (``Razor-pants'' to her detractors). Finally, instead of the bridge it's the climax of the book that explodes, and most satisfactorily. Quality entertainment: the details convince, the people are real, the plot twists legitimate.”

Amazon.com said of Hunting Season, “Edwin Kreiss is a former FBI agent whose discovery of a Chinese espionage ring made him a lot of enemies and resulted in his early retirement. Now his daughter is missing, and nobody, least of all a junior G-woman named Janet Carter, is going to keep him from finding her. Browbeating the one clue to her disappearance out of a terrified college student, Kreiss follows his daughter's trail to a deactivated federal arsenal in southwestern Virginia, where a fanatic whose son was immolated at Waco is cooking up a plan to blow the ATF to bits.

Kreiss is uniquely qualified to play his role as hunter-in-chief. He's been trained as a "sweeper," a job title that refers to the cleanup of rogue agents and other enemies of the state, and he took a few high-tech search-and-destroy goodies with him when he was prematurely put out to pasture by his former employers. Now another sweeper wants to put him out of action, and Janet Carter's getting conflicting signals from her own superiors about just how much cooperation they're willing to give Kreiss as he sets out to rescue his daughter--and, incidentally, redeem his own troubled past.

P.T. Deutermann is a skillful writer who knows how to tell a story. This briskly paced thriller almost turns the pages by itself. Carter, the ostensible heroine of the novel, never quite extinguishes her ambivalence about either Kreiss or the agency she serves, an attempt at multidimensionality of character that's more confusing than revealing. The ending hints at a continued relationship between them, but it's Kreiss, rather than Carter, who engages the reader's attention and whose future we really care about.”

The Library Journal said of The Edge of Honor, “Brian Holcomb is the new weapons officer for the John Bell Hood, a guided-missile frigate on patrol off the coast of Vietnam in the last months of the war. Striving to overcome a less-than-glowing fitness report from his previous ship, Holcomb is tempted to fall into the "go with the flow" ethics of the other officers, who overlook stoned young sailors, until he is befriended by a group of chief petty officers who practice their own justice to keep the ship afloat. In the meantime, Brian's beautiful but immature wife, Maddy, is attracted to a mysterious Native American on his own way to the war, and the ship's captain seems to be unwell and curiously detached from daily problems. Vividly drawn scenes of shipboard life and customs, including liberty at Subic Bay in the Philippines, are contrasted with the high-tension drama of the war itself. Deutermann, a career naval officer, does his usual excellent job of accurate and exciting tale-telling; his romantic subplot, here more successful than in Scorpion in the Sea (LJ 9/15/92), allows him to add the extra dimension of the world of navy wives. A winner for naval history and adventure buffs.”

Amazon.com said of Zero Option, “P.T. Deutermann's latest is a topnotch topical thriller bursting with the expected expertise and insider knowledge he picked up as a Navy captain and arms control specialist. It's also something else: an unexpectedly resonant portrait of people, good and bad, who have been chewed up and spit out by military bureaucracies. Both the hero (an unlucky military investigator named David Stafford, whose career has been short-circuited by whistle-blowing and whose personal life is a disaster area) and the heavy (a career Army bean counter and petty thief, Wendell Carson, who suddenly gets the chance to move up and almost blows it at every occasion) are carefully drawn and fully credible. So are the underlings, officers and FBI agents who thread through their lives. This becomes especially important when Stafford--trying to track down a container of deadly biological nerve gas that Carson has stolen from an Army base in Georgia--crosses paths with a young girl who seems to have psychic powers. In less skilled hands, this kind of rogue element could send a vehicle skittering. But Deutermann quickly gives the girl and her keepers (a mysteriously intriguing woman teacher, a protective small-town policeman) such a strong presence that they become vital to the story's exciting and moving conclusion.”

The Library Journal said of Scorpion in the Sea, “In a post-Cold War navy, where admirals believe their primary duty is to avoid controversy, outspoken Commander Mike Montgomery finds himself banished to an obsolete destroyer fit only for short-distance patrols. But after a Florida fisherman reports seeing the conning tower of a submarine where no submarine should be and a fishing boat disappears almost without a trace, Montgomery and his crew find themselves hunting for a Libyan submarine that is poised to rain destruction on the Florida coast. Deutermann, a former destroyer commander, gives us a suspenseful tale that artfully combines bureaucratic politics with the fox-and-hares maneuvering of the two ships. Even a rather contrived romance between Montgomery and the betrayed wife of his commanding officer fails to spoil the story (although, post-Tailhook, their adulterous affair seems especially inappropriate). Chock full of authentic naval detail, this is not to be missed by action lovers.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of Spider Mountain, “Full of imaginative plotting touches, Deutermann's fast-paced sequel to his acclaimed 2005 suspense novel, The Cat Dancers, finds Cam Richter, formerly a lieutenant with the Manceford County, N.C., sheriff's office, now doing less stressful work as the head of a PI firm staffed with other ex-cops. Park ranger Mary Ellen Goode, Richter's more-than-colleague who was severely traumatized in their last joint inquiry, reaches out to him for help after a probationary ranger is raped and left for dead in a Smoky Mountains national park. Richter's inquiries soon reveal that the crime was tangentially related to a much bigger criminal conspiracy, possibly centered on methamphetamine sales orchestrated by a figure out of a Grimm's fairy tale, the evil Grinny Creigh, and her incestuous clan. The author's impressive ability to bring the remote Appalachian region to life bodes well for the health of this series.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of The Firefly, “Trust Deutermann (Darkside, etc.), veteran thriller writer and former longtime government employee, to produce what appears to be the first major action novel set inside the Department of Homeland Security. It's full of all the requisite paranoia, frustration and rivalry, and brings the acronym count to new highs. When Swamp (for "Swamp Thing") Morgan-a retired Secret Service agent sucked back into the latest crisis-asks why a top Secret Service man at the White House is so upset by Morgan's investigation into what appears to be a "firefly"-a short-lived, unimportant threat-female colleague Lucy VanMetre replies, "Because he sees OSI's decision to proceed with it as a direct criticism of PRU. This isn't about the firefly anymore. It's all about an infringement of PRU's charter within DHS." Readers able to get through passages like that without laughing will probably enjoy (and be able to follow) the twists and turns of this complicated, often lumpy story. Just days before the inauguration of a new president in 2004, Swamp, a huge man with a Neanderthal visage that hides a shrewd brain, is put in nominal charge of an investigation into a fire at a Washington, D.C., plastic surgery clinic where, at night, foreign visitors have been gradually altering their appearances. Is one of them planning an attack on the new president? Swamp thinks so, but he meets high-level resistance at every turn-especially from Lucy, a sleek, tough blonde who at one point threatens Swamp with a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay, where 300 individuals from the Washington area are being held in "protective custody." On the day of the inauguration, a mortar strike on the Capitol is only the beginning of a multi-twist finale. Perhaps this isn't the easiest of reads, but nobody can accuse Deutermann of not being timely.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of The Cat Dancers, “Deutermann's first chapter features the eponymous, anonymous cat dancer as he rappels down a cliff in the dead of night, swings into the cave of a 200-pound female mountain lion and snaps a picture of the enraged beast as she attempts to disembowel him. The scene then shifts to a pair of thugs, who, while attempting to rob a gas station minimart, shoot the Pakistani owner and cause a fire that incinerates a young soccer mom and her child. The scumbag perps skate on a technicality when judge Annie Bellamy points out they were never read their rights before confessing. That Deutermann (Firefly; Darkside) is able to fuse these two disparate plots is testament to his well-drawn characters, intelligent, realistic dialogue and top-notch writing. Lt. Cam Richter, of the Manceford County, N.C., Sheriff's Office, is in charge of the minimart case, which becomes much more complicated after he receives an e-mail attachment that shows one of the two freed killers, K-dog Simmonds, being electrocuted in what is clearly a home-made electric chair. Cam is soon headed into the backcountry of the Great Smoky Mountains on the trail of both a nest of vigilante killers and the elusive, possibly apocryphal Eastern mountain lion. Petrified readers will be checking under the bed and in the closets for any panthers that may have crept inside while they were glued to the pages.”

Booklist said of Official Privilege, “Deutermann immediately divulges the identity of the killer of two navy lieutenants, brother and sister. But which admiral caused the deeds, and why? Such intricacies within the Puzzle Palace, aka the Pentagon, retired captain Deutermann knows well from his own career. On this fictional sea, his jargon and feeling for ambition and bureaucratic politics at the navy's middle ranks ring true, as his two investigators get stonewalled. Removed from the case by the admiral who asked for them in the first place, Commander Dan Collins and civilian Grace Snow (romance a-budding, naturally) proceed as freelancers. The killer catches wind of their progress via his spy gear and becomes worried that those who employed him may consequently desire his permanent disappearance. So he lashes out at the heroes in a violent scene--which stirs up the admirals' flunkies, belatedly aware they haven't stifled Collins and Snow--and finally in a plot-resolving shootout at the Washington Naval Yard. Deutermann's third mystery, though conventionally constructed, is brought off well.”

Booklist said of Sweepers, “A skeleton from the Vietnam closet upsets the career ascent of several posterior-covering admirals. The skeleton is a secret assassin named Galantz, sore at being abandoned in the Mekong Delta by a navy lieutenant. Now an admiral, Tag Sherman becomes the object of the assassin's vengeance. Two naval people, male and female, investigate the case, which arises when two of Sherman's friends die suddenly. Sherman blames that old assassin, a point debated continuously by the investigators. But readers, through the magic of authorial omniscience, eavesdrop on Sherman's superiors in the Pentagon and discover that Sherman is probably truthful; but "those people up the river" (the CIA) have lost control of their assassin. However, those people have deep-cover "sweepers" who clean up such embarrassments, creating the action of an unknown sweeper chasing the investigators who are chasing Galantz. Despite their scrapes with danger, the investigators are flat characters, leaving plausible portrayals of Pentagon office politics as this mystery's primary asset.”