Big If

It''s winter in New Hampshire the economy is booming the vice president is running for president and his Secret Service people are very very tense.Meet Vi Asplund a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens a computer genius who just might be going madand is poised to make a fortune on Big If a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi''s America as she sees it in the crowds in her brother and in her fellow agents is affluent anxious and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence.Through a gallery of vivid charactersheroic ignoble or desperateMark Costello''s hilarious novel limns the strategies both sound and absurd that we conjure to survive in daily life.