Synopsis
P. T. Deutermann (Sweepers) takes us on a gripping thrill ride with Zero Option, a fast-paced technothriller involving an extremely toxic and deadly chemical called Wet Eye. When a cylinder of Wet Eye goes missing, military investigator David Stafford attempts to find it before it falls into nefarious hands. Exciting, absorbing, and original, Zero Option is a great read. P. T. Deutermann is a retired naval officer and a former arms-control specialist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Publishers Weekly
Deutermann's latest (after Sweepers) 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 and government 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), and the heavy (bumbling Army bean-counter and petty thief Wendell Carson) 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 a 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 rogue element could send the vehicle skittering. But Deutermann quickly gives the girl and her keepers (a mysteriously intriguing woman teacher, a protective small-town policewoman) such a strong presence that they become vital to the story's exciting, moving conclusion.