BLUESEED PRODIGY

In Ford’s debut political thriller, a coalition of anti-capitalist groups plots to destroy an offshore hub for foreign entrepreneurs and businessmen, thereby tightening their grip over world power.

Mario, an industrious and honest casino mogul with secret international investments, has created Blueseed, a floating casino and resort and a clandestine outpost for global innovators seeking to poach talent from Silicon Valley. In a speculative America where foreigners are banned from investing in entrepreneurial endeavors, Mario and his coterie of ambitious executives (plus a few beautiful women) take the huge risk of taunting the recently formed Immigration and Business Bureau. The I & B is headed by the vicious Maurice, a self-flagellating Catholic bureaucrat hellbent on destroying the rich. As Maurice feels the pressure to prove himself to his bosses and his God, his tactics get increasingly barbarous. Despite brains and fastidiousness, the Blueseed camp unknowingly finds itself up against a massive conspiracy involving Occupy activists, Iranian thugs, unions, the United Nations and the U.S. president. Ford’s complex story is sometimes illogical, and his writing is largely exposition, punctuated by banal love scenes—“They were joined in this exotic dance for what seemed like hours”— and thinly veiled political stereotyping: “He came around to believe in the cause of destroying capitalism. He couldn’t accept the idea that he didn’t have a life of luxury, and the wealthy did.” Indeed, the book’s anti-leftist paranoia might get a little grating even for sympathetic readers. And though the incessant focus on the corruption of the United Nations and the heartlessness of social justice activists might be tolerable, the flashes of racism and Islamophobia—“the Iranian Muslims…had repeatedly called for a world jihad by all Muslims against the Great Satan, the United States”—are hard to ignore.

Lackluster action with an unrelenting ideological bent.