No book with the ocean as its background can ignore what is happening to the seas and its creatures. Simon Chase is no longer an environmentalist firebrand. All that intense emotion exhausted him without accomplishing much for the ocean. He now contents himself with trying to preserve what life he can with the small means at his disposal. As the book begins, he is protecting a pregnant female white shark from those who would kill her.

He cooperates with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, and the agency at Hartford as well, but no longer feels that he can single-handedly reverse the trend of destruction.