Die Geheimnisse des Admirals Sherman

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. Other of his excellent thrillers available in paperback include The Edge of Honor, Official Privilege, Scorpion in the Sea, and Sweepers. --Dick Adler