Prolific author Jerome Charyn wraps up his Isaac Sidel mystery series with Winter Warning (Pegasus Crime), a noir thriller that sets a pistol-packing, Jewish U.S. president on a collision course with White House rivals, Russian gangsters and private mercenaries. In a story set in the 1980s, former New York City mayor Sidel — whose last appearance was in the 2012 novel Under the Eye of God — has become commander-in-chief, after the president-elect was forced to resign. The action revs up early, when Sidel meets a former Israeli premier at Camp David, and then commandos attack the presidential retreat. Michael Chabon has call Charyn “one of the most important writers in American literature.” — Mordecai Specktor
