Book Description

The Secret Service agents guarding the vice president steel their nerves to a multitude of dangers every day. When he runs for the top spot on the Democratic ticket, however, their personal lives may just be the biggest obstacle to keeping him safe.

Wry, muscular Vi Asplund is the daughter of an atheist insurance adjuster who took the young Vi and her brother, Jens, to the grisly accident scenes he covered. This tolerance for the macabre follows Vi into her career as an agent, and into Jens's development as the software designer for a gorey video game. Chief-of-detail Gretchen Williams fights to keep the team in order, while Agent Tashmo, a veteran presidential guard, reflects on the glory days of the Reagan administration.

As the primary approaches, these intense men and women balance their own lives with that of the vice president. An astounding novel of survival and absurdity, Big If casts a sharp eye on America today.

Amazon.com

Substantial insider detail and highly developed, creatively drawn characters help make Mark Costello's Big If a highly memorable work. Struggling to find her place in the Secret Service, Vi Asplund has accepted the high-stress position of guarding the vice president during his New Hampshire primary run. Her brother Jens, co-creator of the realistically brutal computer game Big If, can cash in his lucrative stock options soon if his increasingly troubled conscience and mental imbalance don't overwhelm him first. Both are reeling from the death of their father Walter, a respected insurance-adjusting atheist. Vi's boss Gretchen, a single mom, is trying to maintain unity among her team as well as a connection to her troubled son. Her diverse crew includes Tashmo, a veteran agent with an overactive libido, and Lloyd Felker, a revered protection theorist and creator of The Dome, the Service-implemented area of safety.

While Jens reluctantly bows to pressure from his superiors to create human-like monsters for Big If, Felker's mysterious disappearance heightens apprehensions among the team, who are increasingly uncertain about their ability to protect the vice president against a dense and volatile public. Costello offers a remarkable level of accessible and fascinating governmental information, and he's rendered his cast with inventive depth, such as Tashmo's fixation on Ronald Reagan and the woman on the Land O'Lakes logo, or Walter's habit of crossing out the word "God" on every dollar bill. Big If is a rare novel: a complex examination of conflicting American ideals that's also accessible, fun, and totally worthwhile.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly

Costello's second novel, the first under his own name (he published Bag Men as John Flood), may well be the literary discovery of the season. Organized around the presidential campaign of an unnamed vice-president who is barely glimpsed, Costello shines the plot light on the man's Secret Service guard. In Costello's America, the citizenry has given up on politics except as sort of a minor holiday; passionate political commitment belongs primarily to potential assassins. The Dome (the Secret Service's nickname) is headed by Gretchen Williams, a black single mother from L.A. haunted by the specter of riots. Her crew contains two veterans of the Reagan years: Lloyd Felker (a protection intellectual and the founder of the Dome) and Tashmo, a '70s-style philanderer suffering through the waning of his adulterous impulses. There's also the diva of Protection, beautiful, horny Bobbie Niles, and heroine Vi Asplund. Vi comes from Center Effing, N.H., where her father, Walter, was an atheist Republican insurance adjuster. Vi joined the Dome after Walter died (the compliment at his funeral from an arson squad cop was that no one could read scorch marks like her father ), and Jens, Vi's brother, works for Big If, an interactive fantasy role-playing game company. Jens is suffering a crisis of cyber faith: his code is beautiful, but the end products are literally monsters. Costello moves easily between riffs, with a truly magical feeling for insider's knowledgehow a cop sits at a bar, how a real estate agent spiels a sale, how an insurance adjuster analyzes damage. Costello might be this season's Jonathan Franzen, a dazzling literary novelist with popular appeal.

From Booklist

From the outset, Costello plunges readers into the fully realized world of Vi Asplund, a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the vice-president. As the daughter of an accident investigator, she saw things--a farmhand with one foot, a golf pro dead from lightning--that prepared her well for the tense uncertainties she faces on a daily basis. She was assigned to the unit at her own request after a boring stint in anticounterfeiting, but she is starting to suffer from the ill effects of too much stress--in particular, the emotional fallout from a disastrous stop for a photo-op in a flooded town, which claimed the life of a much-valued member of the team. Meanwhile, her brother, Jens, a computer genius who writes code for a war game, is starting to question the ethics of his creations, namely, the too-lifelike villains who are armed to the teeth. Costello's thoughtful novel (following Bag Men, 1997, written under the name John Flood) eerily captures the way we seem to live now--a mundane daily routine punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Joanne Wilkinson

From Library Journal

Where are the Ozzies and Harriets of today? Certainly not in Costello's second novel (after Big Men), which details the sinister/comic antics of yet another dysfunctional American family. The Asplunds live in Center Effing, NH, where the atheist father is obsessed with crossing out God's name wherever he happens to find it, especially on currency. His daughter Vi enters a career in the Secret Service, protecting the vice president as he crisscrosses the country. So much attention is given to tracking the minutiae of the VP's team that this might be regarded almost as a Secret Service procedural. The Asplund son is a ham radio nut who blossoms into a computer geek and writes monster logic software for a computer conglomerate called Big If. Costello riffs on such tried-and-true themes as software games and presidential politics and seems to be suggesting that the country gets just what its families deserve. A dust jacket quote from Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, praising Costello as a "writer of real distinction" may be enough to get this one noticed. For larger public libraries.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

About Author

Mark Costello worked as a federal prosecutor for five years before writing his first novel, Bag Men, under the name John Flood. He lives in New York.

Book Dimension:

length: (cm)20.3 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)13.6