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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.”
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