Customer Reviews

Sweepers: A Novel of Suspense

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The novel begins with what appears to be a routine police investigation into what may or not be an accidental death. A beautiful woman is dead and her former boyfriend, a frocked Rear Admiral (lower half)assigned to the navy staff at the Pentagon may or may not be a suspect.

The young admiral, who had served in Vietnam years before as the skipper of a Swift boat plying the tributaries of the Mekong River has something of a past. His marriage ended in divorce like so many other military marriages. His only son, a real dirtbag and loser hates him and wants revenge. So does the ex-Navy SEAL who feels that young Lieutenant Sherman left him for dead so many years before.

As the case gets murkier, an old friend and mentor of RADM Sherman dies of a heart attack. Is it really a heart attack or a well disguised murder which hints at further retribution?

The Navy and local police get involved and the Judge Advocate General of the Navy (the JAG) also gets involved by assigning a female lawyer on the verge of retirement and an NIS (Naval Investigative Service) agent to the case. Things become very complicated very quickly and more than just Admiral Sherman begin to find themselves in jeopardy and facing real risks.

Since his first novel, SCORPION IN THE SEA, Peter Deutermann has only improved as a writer and storyteller. His former career as a Surface Warfare Officer, Arms Negotiator and Senior Staff Officer provided him with both an excellent background and volumes of material from which to draw his stories. He writes very well and provides his readers with all of the information necessary to understand the arcane ways in which the operational and staff sides of the Navy work on a day-to-day basis. He also fully develops his characters. While he doesn't do so too quickly, he provides just enough information on each of them to keep the reader wondering just what else he has in store for them. He also lets the reader hang just long enough until he drops the next vital piece of info. It is my opinion that Peter Deutermann has become a master of pacing and tension building and he has done much to create his own sub-genre in the larger arena of military and techno-thrillers. Call it the naval mystery if you will but understand that this specialized type of fiction belongs to Deutermann and Deutermann alone.

I heartily recommend this book and all of the others by this fine writer. His other books are NOT part of a series so it does not matter what order you read them in. If you like(ed) SWEEPERS then try OFFICIAL PRIVILEGE; it's where Captain Deutermann segued off and started writing naval mysteries.

His other books are all excellent, too and will provide many hours of suspenseful but enjoyable reading. I hope he continues to write for years to come. BZ Captain Deutermann! Thank you for many hours of reading enjoyment.

P.T. Deutermann has been writing Naval books like this for a while now. His genre has wound up being a book-length version of the TV show JAG. That means (for those of you who haven't seen the show) a cross between Tom Clancy and John Grisham. The setting is more Clancy, the plot more Grisham.

In this instance, a newly-promoted Admiral in the Navy is briefly a suspect in the murder of his ex-girlfriend. Her death was originally thought an accident, and only anomalies in the crime scene made the police suspicious. Because of the police suspicions, a female Commander in the Navy who's an investigator for JAG is assigned to liase with the police, and watch over the investigation to make sure that there aren't any scandals brewing (the book is set in the mid-90s, with Tailhook, Boorda's suicide, and various other scandals looming large in the rearview mirror). She's assigned a partner, a new civilian investigator from the Naval Investigative Service named "Train" von Rensel. They quickly ascertain that the villain of the piece is a Navy Seal that the Admiral abandoned one night in Viet Nam. The guy has been listed as MIA ever since, and apparently working for the CIA as a "sweeper", an assassin who kills other assassins who get out of line.

I had some problems with the book. The plot seems to plod along for the first half of the book, or so. It's 400+ pages and feels as if a hundred could have been deleted without much pain. The two main characters, Train and the girl, are a bit dull and uninspired in their attempts to unravel the circumstances of the original incident in Viet Nam, and the plot there contains a twist that was more than a bit of a coincidence and not particularly believable to me. Also I too had problems with the portrayal of the main bad guy, the Seal. While I have no difficulty imagining one of these guys turning into a criminal, I do get impatient with them being portrayed as undefeatable. In this instance, he's that throughout the book until the very end, when someone finally manages to momentarily surprise him, once. He does all of the super secret Ninja stuff, walk through walls, pick locks without it being apparent he did so, kill people and make it look like an accident, etc. It's a bit much.

Anyway, I still enjoyed the book at some level, and if you're into this sort of thing, I would recommend it.

The bad folks are truly evil and the heroes are terrific in the most literately done novel I've read since I can remember!

P.T. Deutermann, Captain, USN, retired, goes considerably further than the other top writer involved in military detail in that his characters come alive and his specific events leave you pretty much "ridden hard and put away wet". He makes convoluted plots easily understandable and his use of plain English is wonderful.

When a young gunboat skipper, "in-country" in the waterways of Vietnam, leaves a U S Navy SEAL stranded as the result of a tad too much unfriendly fire he creates his worst nightmare. The SEAL becomes known as a MIA...then pops up years later to exact some serious payback from the now newly promoted admiral that left him in the water and weeds of the Vietnamese jungle

Having read Deutermann in the past, i eagerly grabbed this book off the library shelf. i truly was on the edge of my seat for his other two books and for this one too, until the second and third times our hero and heroine were taken and/or taken in by the bad guy. pt, you are capable of better than this. i did enjoy it, though...

I enjoy the writing style of Peter T. Dutermann. I like the way his plots play out. Always exciting and keeps readers like me on the edge of their seats during the entire book.

Sweepers qualifies as one of the lighter style Tom Clancy techno-thrillers. I don't know about you, but when storys get too technical, I get bored. It takes too much mental effort to assimilate all the techno-babble, plus I get sick of the author trying impress me while the story line crams techspeak into my head. Lot's of people do like it though, and Clancy's success has created a groundswell of authors who love to get technical under the guise of fiction. Some authors are more story oriented than technical, and I like those books better than the Jane's version of fiction.

Peter T. Duetermann, a retired Navy capitan, is one of those authors, and Sweepers is definitely one of those books; a strong plot and not so technical that it loses the story line.

Sweepers starts strong and keeps moving right to the last page. Duetermann gives the book a good plot and a great ending, peppering it with Navy acronyms, but nothing an adult reader can't understand. Expect a lot of Navy chain-of-command stuff; it won't interfere with the story, but rather complements it because understanding Navy chain-of-command is an integral part of the plot.

Sweepers has the traditional good guy going after the quintessential bad guy and a leading herione thrown in for good mix. The story isn't centered around steamy sex, porn or Kung-Fu fighting on every third page; in fact it has very little sex, one scene, and a limited amount of hand to hand combat.

What Sweepers does have is suspense; and it builds from the first page in a Vietnam flashback to the last page with an ending that only the CIA will appreciate. Sweepers threads the story around both its characters and a very scary and believable plot. Read it, but don't start it on a week night. You won't put it down til you're done.

This is the first book that I have read by pt and thought it was great. Once I picked it up I had to finish it in one setting. The action and suspense kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. I am looking forward to reading more from him.

This is an intelligent procedural touching on how the admirals in the Pentagon go about their attempt to rewrite or conceal an embarrassing bit of Naval history. The principals are attractive and interesting, and there are enough red herrings to make the end not all that predictable. This is a big book offering a lot of conversation and a lot of action, so fans of either should find enough to entertain them for a day or so. One of the principals is a captain who's been selected for promotion to rear admiral, and this prompted my checking the Navy register, where I found that there are about 350 admirals of various levels.

Sweepers starts with a very strong Prologue. It relates a Navy SEAL's stream-of-consciousness as he deals with some dire circumstances in a Vietnamese swamp while evading capture by the Viet Cong. It reminds me somewhat of the Destroyer action-adventure series created by Sapir and Murphy. The second chapter of every Destroyer novel begins with the sentence "His name was Remo." In a similar way, Sweepers' Prologue begins with "Marcus Galantz ...." His iron will, training, and physical abilities as a Navy SEAL are highlighted well. Unfortunately, Sweepers abandons this realistic portrayal of SEAL capabilities later in the book, and the rogue SEAL depends almost exclusively upon a techno-gizmo which overloads his victims' retinal nerves in multiple encounters. I would have preferred that the author continue to develop the SEAL and his abilities as was done in the Prologue, but he didn't, and I can live with that. It's still a very good book.

Deutermann's strength is in portraying the hidden political moves one might find in the Pentagon's various fiefdoms. I never was assigned to the Pentagon, but I was an enlisted man in the Navy for twenty years (and eight months, and twenty three days), and Deutermann's Pentagon scenes "feel" right to me.

The leading female character, Commander Lawrence, made a few ill-considered moves which put her life in danger, once almost fatally, but, by the end of the book, she moved away from the incapable-female stereotype and provided the key to successfully resolving the rogue-SEAL dilemma.

It's a good book. Navy vets will probably enjoy it, although SEAL vets might think it's kinda silly.

Perhaps to someone better versed in navy language referring to a character as "the Admiral", when there are at least six Admirals in a story, would not be confusing. However, I could not tell who was who, much less why they were behaving in the way they were. What can I say except that the motives were muddy, the plot was moldy, the characters were transparent or opaque, the writing simplistic and the book overall just....boring.