When an entire Antarctic ice shelf slid into the sea, raising the oceans enough to drown most of the world's coastlines and coastal cities, the repercussions weren't just environmental and economic. Throngs of refugees from countries too poor to recover from the Deluge flocked toward the United States, threatening to swamp it in a human tide. Alarmed, the U.S. sealed its borders and remade the Immigration and Naturalization Service into its most powerful, and feared, armed service.

So when Patricia Beenan, a salvage operator from the floating city of New Galveston, finds a freighter that looks like it was sunk by INS ordnance--mercilessly drowning fifty foreigners in the hold--she's both sickened and scared. While investigating the wreck, her little submarine is hailed by an INS cutter that's been skulking ominously nearby. Spooked, Beenan turns tail, but not before uploading a video of the scuttled freighter to the media.

Soon Commander Thomas Becket, from INS's Criminal Investigations Division, is on the case--and wondering whom to trust. The admiral at the local INS base and detention center is already telling him to soft-pedal possible INS involvement. Becket tracks down Beenan, and even as they realize they're falling for each other, they're dodging a hail of bullets smacking into the surf around them. Someone's desperately trying to get them out of the way--someone clearly deep inside INS itself.

The more evidence Becket and Beenan piece together, the more alarmed they become at the size of the conspiracy, which appears to be based in a reactionary movement bent on keeping foreigners out of America at all costs. In constant danger, and uncertain who the good guys are, the lovers have very little time in which to uncover and stop the powerful syndicate's terrible master stroke.

A turbulent passage

The near-future, post-Deluge world of Blind Waves is instantly recognizable. If the ice cap were to melt today, drowning low-lying cities and displacing hundreds of millions of people, this world is what we'd probably get: rebuilt and innovative, but alert and on-guard, susceptible to overreaction in protection of sharply reduced resources. Quite properly, Gould doesn't spend much time describing what happened during and after the disaster. The events of the Deluge--which are, after all, taken for granted by his characters--form the context for the story he wants to tell, with details revealed as needed.

Unfortunately, the novel's environment is executed better than the characters that live in it. In his first novel, Jumper, Gould showed himself adept at character development; but here it's been neglected, with romance a poor substitute. Becket and Beenan are promising and dynamic people, but by the end the only way they've changed is that they are now trading cutesy-poo quips and not-so-subtle innuendo (not to mention reams of classy but credulity-straining Shakespeare quotes).

The rest of the characters are sketchily drawn. The supporting roles are really just names, and Gould here reconfirms his tendency to paint his villains with a black brush. Of course, it might be argued that this is an action-adventure story, a genre in which good-guy/bad-guy treatment is hardly unusual. In fact Blind Waves tells an interesting and sometimes exciting story, with enough technical and background detail to be convincing.

One more Gould mannerism to note: His lead characters talk to themselves in sarcastic asides. What is at first an annoying device becomes a useful and flexible peek at reactions and motivations. When Gould again works with more developed characters, this technique should serve him well.