Author Visit: P.T. Deutermann!!

P.T. Deutermann, although not a Southerner by birth, is one by choice. After a 26-year career as a Naval officer, Mr. Deutermann retired to Rockingham county to write full-time. His first nine novels are suspense thrillers, many of them having some type of connection to the navy. In 2006, he released The Cat Dancers, the first of the series featuring retired Sheriffs’ Deputy, Cam Richter. The series is set primarily in western North Carolina, in the fictional Manceford County, which is somewhat north and west of Charlotte. The Cat Dancers are a shadowy group of vigilantes, who have an initiation ritual of a face-to-face encounter with a wild mountain lion. Lt. Richter becomes personally involved when his ex-wife, a sitting judge, is killed.

In the next installment, Spider Mountain, Deputy Richter is now ex-deputy Richter, and he has opened his own private investigation business, assisted by the two best sidekicks in crime fiction, a pair of German Sheperds named Frick and Frack. He agrees to help a friend out by looking into the brutal assault on a female forest ranger in a remote area of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. There, he runs into a sinister Appalachian matriarch named Ginny Creigh who controls the local crystal meth trade, and owns most everything and everyone in their neck of the woods.

In The Moonpool, one of Cam’s investigators is found dead in a convenience store restroom in Wilmington, North Carolina. When her body sets off radiation alarms, a heavily guarded nearby nuclear power plant, becomes suspect. Racing against time, Cam uncovers an inside threat, a plan to use the plant's own systems to initiate an unstoppable, disastrous series of events.

In the most recent novel, Nightwalkers, released this past June, Cam decides to retire (again) and purchases a 700-acre antebellum plantation in the North Carolina countryside. He almost immediately finds himself targeted by a determined stalker, who holds Cam responsible for some unknown crime. Cam will need all of his resources, including his redoubtable German Shepherd companions, to stay alive as he deals with the stalker, some very eccentric people, and all the entanglements of a place suddenly alive with ghostly secrets and the fruits of a bloody past.

P.T. Deutermann is currently at work on his 14th book, a historical novel about World War II, to be called Glory. He is part of the Authors on the Road program, and will be speaking at the Headquarters Library on Tuesday, September 1st at 6:30 pm. This event is free to the public and is sponsored by the the North Carolina Literary Festival, which will be held in Chapel Hill on September 10th through the 13th.

--Sana M.