Winter Warning

August 14, 2017
Isaac Sidel tilts futilely at windmills, with a pistol instead of a lance (hence his nickname, Don Quixote with a Glock), in Charyn’s enjoyable if sometimes baffling 12th novel featuring the former New York City police chief turned politician (after 1999’s Citizen Sidel). Sometime in the 1980s, Sidel is elected vice president of the United States, but he becomes the commander-in-chief after the president-elect resigns to avoid indictment for shady land deals. Once Sidel moves into the Oval Office, it seems that everyone wants him out, including Gaddhafi, Colombian drug lords, the Aryan Brotherhood, Russian thugs, and “business moguls who recognized as an immediate threat—a Stalinist in the White House.” A weekend at Camp David turns into a coup attempt. Who’s responsible? There’s no shortage of bad actors or intrigue, but the maniacal plot and large cast of characters can be overwhelming, especially for those unfamiliar with Sidel’s backstory. Still, this bleak vision of America—capitalists and criminals are indistinguishable—clearly echoes the current state of American political life.

August 15, 2017
Isaac Sidel, last seen (Under the Eye of God, 2012) as vice president-elect, becomes president when his top guy is forced to resign. Fireworks ensue, most of them not especially patriotic.Swept into the second spot and then the top spot by the Slaughter of '88, Isaac finds himself with a lot less power than when he was the Pink Commish, and later the mayor, of New York. His trusted chief of staff, Brenda Brown, has fled the Beltway madness; her successor, Ramona Dazzle, seems to think keeping her boss in the dark is at the heart of her job description; and there are rumors that Vice President Bull Latham is really running the country. Dazzled by the constant conflicts between everybody and everybody else, Isaac soon realizes that the real power brokers are unelected thugs, financiers, and apparatchiks like Gen. Raymond Tollhouse, head of private-security octopus Wildwater; Baron Pierre de Robespierre, Renata's Swiss banker; German publishing baron Rainer Wolff; and Viktor Danzig, the tattoo artist dubbed Rembrandt for his flawless counterfeit $50 bills. Counterfeiting indeed provides a radical figure for the action here, although prolific, multitalented Charyn (Jerzy, 2017, etc.) floats enough demotic metaphors within some paragraphs to swamp the nominal action. Isaac, "a clown with a Glock" adrift in a world in which anything can happen to anyone by the end of any sentence, bounces like a bagatelle ball from a school for assassins to the Sons of Rossiya and an uprising at Rikers, where he earns the headline "POTUS TOP COP" before achieving the ultimate Oval Office accolades: Saul Bellow compares him to Isaac's beloved Augie March, and Danzig tells him that "he was now a registered werewolf." Less antic than some of its waggish hero's earlier chronicles but still manically inventive, proudly undisciplined, and peopled with dark lords and ladies best characterized by wildly inflated epithets--in other words, nothing at all like any presidencies since 1988.

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September 1, 2017
Acclaimed author Charyn succeeds in making the reader feel like a character in one of Gogol's surreal tales, which is exactly the way Isaac Sidel views his life now that he has glocked his way to the White House. When we last encountered Sidel (Citizen Sidel, 1999), he was a candidate for vice president, but circumstances have catapulted him to the exalted position of POTUS. Present-day political upheaval dims in comparison to that of Sidel's riotous 1980s. As usual, he has more enemies than friends and is viewed by all as a catastrophe as a president. Those enemies (perhaps even those friends) want him out of office, with assassination preferable to impeachment. His bizarre Kafka obsession leads to an ill-conceived trip to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia that ends with a big boom that may constitute the grand finale of his presidency. Then again, maybe not. Considered by many the most innovative crime writer of his generation, Charyn brings a rip-roaring conclusion to one astounding and outstanding series. Suggest to fans of the unpredictable Carl Hiaasen.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)