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Spectator
7 days ago
- Spectator
A summer of suspense: recent crime fiction
Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying 'Prithee Sir' a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Joseph Farrell (Open Borders Press, £18.99), is one such addition, though an unusual one. It is set in Bologna in 1944, the vicious period after Italy's first surrender, Mussolini's capture and daring escape, and the invasion by Nazi troops to counter the Allies' advance from the south. The protagonist is named De Luca, a former police detective who enjoys a near-legendary reputation but who has now been pressed into service in the fascist regime's 'political police'. He loathes this new role, and tries to ignore the screams of those being tortured in the dungeons of the building where he works. When three separate murders are uncovered in rapid succession, however, De Luca is able to exercise his former skills. Bologna proves a perilous place to operate, as De Luca faces threats not only from the partisans active in the city but also from the invading Germans, who show very little leniency to the local fascisti, since in their eyes they are just another bunch of hopeless Italians. They do not hesitate to pressure De Luca to solve the murder of a German soldier (one of the three victims), warning him that failure to find the culprit will result in the arbitrary execution of ten Italians. Throughout the novel, we receive only minimal information about De Luca's personal life, other than that he sleeps alone in the barracks at the top of his office quarters. He is focused exclusively on the murder cases. The writing is chilling in its clinical depiction of him going about his work, and the drabness of wintertime Bologna is finely drawn – 'like a souk, an old, filthy kasbah of dirty snow'. The occasional awkwardness of the translation reinforces the strangeness of Bologna in the last year of the war. The research that must have been required for the book's wealth of detail is remarkable, and its fruits are helpfully contained in a lengthy glossary at the back – usually an annoying feature, but in this case ably reinforcing the factual basis of a marvellous novel. The setting of Andrew Taylor's A Schooling in Murder (Hemlock Press, £20) – a girl's English boarding school near Gloucester – could not be more different. It represents a new departure for this gifted thriller writer, and takes place while the war is winding down in spring 1945, between VE and VJ days. The protagonist, a teacher at the school named Annabel Warnock, has been pushed off a cliff to her death. She exists in the story as a ghost, who is intent on uncovering her killer. Invisible to all the other characters, Annabel is able to communicate with a male teacher who has come to take her place on the staff, but only when he is at work on the detective novel he is trying to write. Though there is little of the sinister political violence of The Darkest Winter, this is not an addition to the swelling ranks of cosy crime fiction. To have a novel told by a ghost is, on the surface, a preposterous conceit, but one that the veteran Taylor pulls off with considerable aplomb and with the narrative skill his readers have come to expect. Mark Ezra's A Sting in the Tale (No Exit Press, £9.99) begins with Felicity Jardine, a seventysomething retired intelligence officer, preparing to drown herself. Her plan is interrupted when, mid-river, she spies a baby's car seat coming downstream with a sleeping baby on board. Objectively, this is about as likely a proposition as Taylor's ghost, but once even provisionally accepted, it lays the ground for the rollicking present-day story that follows, as Felicity tries to discover who the parents are and who else is looking for the child. Alternating with this plot is a series of extensive flashbacks – to Bonn in the 1970s, where, while working for MI6, Felicity has been placed in a German government job, posing as an Austrian. A female colleague is being wooed by a handsome Englishman, but Felicity rightly suspects that he is working for the Russians and getting the colleague to pass on confidential information. The link between Felicity's past in Bonn and the arrival of the baby in her life is smoothly made, and there are many inventive scenes, including a quite horrific case of frost burn that saves Felicity's life. It's a well-written book, punchy throughout. The eponymous hero of Graham Hurley's Kane (Head of Zeus, £20) works in the United States Secret Service, guarding Franklin D. Roosevelt when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The Roosevelts figure prominently in the novel, as Kane has a younger sister who is struck down by polio, much like the president. Other historical characters make fleeting appearances, including Winston Churchill, who proves a boorish and demanding White House guest. The action moves to the west coast and Los Angeles, where Kane is sent to commission a quantity of $1,000 bills from a talented counterfeiter. The bogus dollars will be used to bribe the French admiral, François Darlan, who is wavering between his superiors in Vichy France and the Republicans in exile under de Gaulle. Soon Kane finds himself confronting a Mexican gangster named Cuesta, who abducts the woman Kane has set his heart on. The anti-Japanese hysteria of Californians in the wake of Pearl Harbor is well evoked, and it makes a welcome change for Hollywood to enjoy only a minor role in a Los Angeles setting. More adventure story than mystery, the novel has scenes of great violence, but its characters are lively and distinctive and the writing is first-rate throughout. There is, oddly, a lengthy coda which takes Kane to North Africa to help protect Darlan. Misplaced though this addendum seems, it does suggest a sequel to come – revealing, one hopes, the same imaginative energy on display here.
Daily Mirror
09-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
Next bank holiday date with six more to come in 2025
There will be six more bank holidays between now and the end of 2025, but it all depends on where in the UK you are We may be more than halfway through 2025, but there are still eight bank holidays to come across the UK between now and the end of that year, although the specific dates vary between the different nations. The most recent bank holiday fell on Monday, May 26, the Spring bank holiday. This was a national holiday for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, sometimes individual UK nations have bank holidays on different days. This was the case at Easter, when England, Wales and Northern Ireland enjoyed two bank holidays on Good Friday, April 18, and Easter Monday, April 21. In Scotland, though, only Good Friday was recognised as a bank holiday. Northern Ireland will have its next bank holiday on Monday, July 14, which will mark the Battle of the Boyne bank holiday, before Scotland celebrates its Summer bank holiday on Monday, August 4. The rest of the UK, including England, Wales and Northern Ireland, will observe their Summer bank holidays on Monday, August 25. Additionally, Scotland will exclusively celebrate St Andrew's Day bank holiday on Monday, December 1. After this there are then two UK-wide bank holidays to come: Christmas Day and Boxing Day, Thursday and Friday December 25 and 26. There were suggestions for an extra bank holiday this year as May 8 marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day. This day is commemorated annually to honour the Allies' formal acceptance of Germany's surrender in 1945. As 2024 drew to a close, whispers emerged of a possible extra bank holiday on VE Day, May 8, courtesy of Downing Street. However, the Government decided to instead "use the existing May Day bank holiday for commemorative events". Remaining UK bank holidays for 2025 Monday, July 14 - Battle of the Boyne (substitute) - Northern Ireland only Monday, August 4 - Summer bank holiday - Scotland only Monday, August 25 - Summer bank holiday - England, Wales and Northern Ireland Monday, December 1 - St Andrew's Day (substitute) - Scotland only Thursday, December 25 - Christmas Day - England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland Friday, December 26 - Boxing Day - England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
The Sun
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Predator: Killer of Killers spans time for brutal hunts
FROM one hunt to the next, each bloody battle across time and space, be it against man or some other form of sentient life across the galaxy, the Yautja relish in their primordial culture of hunting prey they deem equal. Better known as 'the Predator' in pop culture, each wound, feat, kill and trophy collected serves as war medals for a Yautja's prowess. Like the extraterrestrial apex predators, director Dan Trachtenberg too has claimed another gory, blood-soaked trophy with Predator: Killer of Killers. Set across different time periods, Killer of Killers opens in the frigid northern oceans, as the mighty Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) leads a horde of Viking warriors into the stronghold of the Krivich tribe, seeking to take the head of its leader. Almost a thousand years later, the ninja Kenji (Louis Ozawa) launches a lone attempt to defeat his brother Kiyoshi, a daimyo, in his castle. Fast forward several hundred years from then, during World War II, fighter pilot John Torres (Rick Gonzalez) finds his squadron under aerial attack and takes to the skies to fight back against someone he believes is not on either the Allies' or Axis Powers' side in the war. The three storylines eventually converge on a planet that a group of Predators have turned into a coliseum. Past meets Predator Three years ago, Trachtenberg's Prey was released to wide acclaim, with one of the big positives being the film's setting, which took the film's Predator to 18th century America, pitting a hulking Yautja against Native American warriors from the Comanche tribe. Trachtenberg stripped the bloated excess that recent films in the franchise had and brought it back to the gritty basics of the first Predator from 1987. It was also a long-held dream of franchise fans brought to life. A dream born from a single question: 'What would a Predator film look like if it took place during a bygone era etched within history books?' For Killer of Killers, Trachtenberg revisits the same concept, bringing the story to not just one time period, but three separate ones from different corners of the planet. The film is also inspired by and expands the concept behind 2010's Predators, where humans are abducted, brought to a different planet, then hunted by the Yautja as wild game. Thrilling combat, thin characters LaVanchy, Ozawa and Gonzalez deliver great vocal performances for their distinct characters, but beyond their self-contained story segments, the three lead characters get almost no development. They are introduced and almost immediately face off against the Yautja, before Killer of Killers barrels off into space. In that regard, despite the solid action sequences that use each character's distinct fighting styles to great effect, the film is unfortunately lacklustre in substance compared with the much meatier Prey. However, it may also be intentional as Trachtenberg might be using Killer of Killers as a vehicle to either lay the groundwork or introduce concepts that he will expand more upon in the upcoming live-action film Predator: Badlands, which is set for release later this year. Predator: Killer of Killers is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
The Sun
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Predator Instincts
FROM one hunt to the next, each bloody battle across time and space, be it against man or some other form of sentient life across the galaxy, the Yautja relish in their primordial culture of hunting prey they deem equal. Better known as 'the Predator' in pop culture, each wound, feat, kill and trophy collected serves as war medals for a Yautja's prowess. Like the extraterrestrial apex predators, director Dan Trachtenberg too has claimed another gory, blood-soaked trophy with Predator: Killer of Killers. Set across different time periods, Killer of Killers opens in the frigid northern oceans, as the mighty Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) leads a horde of Viking warriors into the stronghold of the Krivich tribe, seeking to take the head of its leader. Almost a thousand years later, the ninja Kenji (Louis Ozawa) launches a lone attempt to defeat his brother Kiyoshi, a daimyo, in his castle. Fast forward several hundred years from then, during World War II, fighter pilot John Torres (Rick Gonzalez) finds his squadron under aerial attack and takes to the skies to fight back against someone he believes is not on either the Allies' or Axis Powers' side in the war. The three storylines eventually converge on a planet that a group of Predators have turned into a coliseum. Past meets Predator Three years ago, Trachtenberg's Prey was released to wide acclaim, with one of the big positives being the film's setting, which took the film's Predator to 18th century America, pitting a hulking Yautja against Native American warriors from the Comanche tribe. Trachtenberg stripped the bloated excess that recent films in the franchise had and brought it back to the gritty basics of the first Predator from 1987. It was also a long-held dream of franchise fans brought to life. A dream born from a single question: 'What would a Predator film look like if it took place during a bygone era etched within history books?' For Killer of Killers, Trachtenberg revisits the same concept, bringing the story to not just one time period, but three separate ones from different corners of the planet. The film is also inspired by and expands the concept behind 2010's Predators, where humans are abducted, brought to a different planet, then hunted by the Yautja as wild game. Thrilling combat, thin characters LaVanchy, Ozawa and Gonzalez deliver great vocal performances for their distinct characters, but beyond their self-contained story segments, the three lead characters get almost no development. They are introduced and almost immediately face off against the Yautja, before Killer of Killers barrels off into space. In that regard, despite the solid action sequences that use each character's distinct fighting styles to great effect, the film is unfortunately lacklustre in substance compared with the much meatier Prey. However, it may also be intentional as Trachtenberg might be using Killer of Killers as a vehicle to either lay the groundwork or introduce concepts that he will expand more upon in the upcoming live-action film Predator: Badlands, which is set for release later this year.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
103-year-old Pennsylvania veteran shares Normandy experience on D-Day
(WHTM) — Today is June 6, the 81st anniversary of D-Day. It was the Allied invasion of France—the beginning of the Allies' retaking power in continental Europe—and one of the heroes that day was Staff Sergeant Joe Folino. Folino fought in the Battle of the Bulge and stormed Utah Beach at Normandy. He lives outside Pittsburgh and spoke to abc27 news with his daughter, who lives in York Springs. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now 'The worst wasn't the Battle of the Bulge,' Folino said. 'It was the battle with the cold. We got caught sleeping there, but once we got our river clothes on, we did feel good. But before that, we suffered from the cold.' The number of living WWII veterans is shrinking. Lancaster County woman's quick thinking saves lives after Bali tourist boat sinks At 103 years old, Folino is the oldest of the sixteen World War II veterans who gathered on the North Shore in Pittsburgh today. There will be a picture of the men tonight at 5 p.m. on abc27 news. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
