No bones about it
That's a big chunk of the horrific stuff before we even get to the wretched architecture or all the vacant shops or detective sergeant (DS) Roberta Steel's diet of sausage rolls and bacon butties.
This is the 13th book featuring detective chief inspector (DCI) Logan McRae and his merry band of Police Scotland reprobates, gifted to us by author Stuart MacBride, who most definitely is not to everyone's tastes.
Pan Macmillan photo
Scottish writer Stuart MacBride has written 13 Logan McRae novels and six books set in the fictional town of Oldcastle.
MacBride juxtaposes the most awful violence with absolutely hilarious dialogue, glorious Scottish dialect, inspired potty-mouths, eccentric eclectic characters and absurd situations ingeniously rendered.
The adventure begins with an arsonist burning down a shelter for refugees, killing one person. Someone grasses up a suspect, which somehow leads to dozens of pages involving McRae and his hapless cops chasing the suspect all over Aberdeen — it's a veritable street-by-street tour — while the alleged villain hijacks an ice cream van, the ice-lollies entrepreneur still inside, careening throughout the city with mind-numbing jingle still bleating, before flying into the river, where more mayhem ensues.
Meanwhile, a burglar is helping himself to swag in an upstairs room, filling his pockets while waiting for the homeowner to return, knowing that a woman lives there alone. The burglar makes his living through stolen goods, but what he does afterward… as noted, MacBride juxtaposes between horrific and lighter fare, and is not for everyone.
Just as the woman comes home, the burglar hears her confronted by a police officer, who immediately conks her upside the head and drags her to the boot of his car, the burglar all the while filming the abduction on his phone and getting a good look at the licence plate, calculating how much that footage may be worth in blackmail.
The woman is an Australian multimillionaire, a ruthless, vicious oligarch who has gobbled up respectable newspapers, laid off decent journalists and turned the venerable papers into right-wing rags playing to the worst elements of society.
What her abductor does to her and why… again, not for everyone. No, it's not sexual, we'll say that much.
McRae has somehow risen to the rank of DCI, where his days are full of meetings, forms and paperwork galore, but the endless Police Scotland budget cuts and COVID now have him out on the street where he can wreak the most havoc.
He's living with the long-suffering Tara, herself in financial law enforcement, rarely seeing him come home in time for tea, between them having produced a daughter who of course is precocious.
Outstanding among McRae's crew is constable Tufty, a spirited twit whom Logan treats as an ijit but who comes up with more than his share of bright ideas. The word 'unique' should be used on the rarest of occasions, but Tufty's syntax and grammar can only be described as such.
Meanwhile DS Roberta Steel is simply one of the greatest and most bizarre characters in police fiction.
This House of Burning Bones
She was once McRae's boss and a DCI herself, though how she did it in a conservative paramilitary organization, MacBride never really explained. She was demoted after planting evidence to wrongfully convict the vilest of villains who kept getting away with it.
McRae is a sperm donor for Steel and her wife Susan's kids, and plays an active role in their lives.
MacBride describes Steel as having a huge nose and a mass of gray hair somewhere between a Brillo pad and a briar patch. Slovenly would be a compliment; she slouches and flakes out while scratching herself in private places and adjusting her bra and unmentionables in front of everyone, constantly eating, smoking, vaping or all of the above at once.
Her profanity is inspired by genius. While there is no sign she has ever been unfaithful to Susan, she hits on women in public, especially heterosexuals with far more power than she, including senior police officers, noting with glee the sexual wonders she can unleash in them if they will only consent.
Some may note with delight or dismay that the book is 600-plus pages long, at a time too many authors think 280 pages will suffice.
If you're into Stuart MacBride, his latest won't feel long enough. Bring your own sausage rolls and bacon butties.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was in Aberdeen to get the ferry to Shetland. He thought it was nicely old, but who would trust anything an English-born person would say about Scotland?
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Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
No bones about it
Aberdeen can be a ghastly place, where fascists firebomb refugees, blackmailers get tortured horrendously before being gruesomely murdered, kidnap victims are near-starved in dungeons and then buried alive. That's a big chunk of the horrific stuff before we even get to the wretched architecture or all the vacant shops or detective sergeant (DS) Roberta Steel's diet of sausage rolls and bacon butties. This is the 13th book featuring detective chief inspector (DCI) Logan McRae and his merry band of Police Scotland reprobates, gifted to us by author Stuart MacBride, who most definitely is not to everyone's tastes. Pan Macmillan photo Scottish writer Stuart MacBride has written 13 Logan McRae novels and six books set in the fictional town of Oldcastle. MacBride juxtaposes the most awful violence with absolutely hilarious dialogue, glorious Scottish dialect, inspired potty-mouths, eccentric eclectic characters and absurd situations ingeniously rendered. The adventure begins with an arsonist burning down a shelter for refugees, killing one person. Someone grasses up a suspect, which somehow leads to dozens of pages involving McRae and his hapless cops chasing the suspect all over Aberdeen — it's a veritable street-by-street tour — while the alleged villain hijacks an ice cream van, the ice-lollies entrepreneur still inside, careening throughout the city with mind-numbing jingle still bleating, before flying into the river, where more mayhem ensues. Meanwhile, a burglar is helping himself to swag in an upstairs room, filling his pockets while waiting for the homeowner to return, knowing that a woman lives there alone. The burglar makes his living through stolen goods, but what he does afterward… as noted, MacBride juxtaposes between horrific and lighter fare, and is not for everyone. Just as the woman comes home, the burglar hears her confronted by a police officer, who immediately conks her upside the head and drags her to the boot of his car, the burglar all the while filming the abduction on his phone and getting a good look at the licence plate, calculating how much that footage may be worth in blackmail. The woman is an Australian multimillionaire, a ruthless, vicious oligarch who has gobbled up respectable newspapers, laid off decent journalists and turned the venerable papers into right-wing rags playing to the worst elements of society. What her abductor does to her and why… again, not for everyone. No, it's not sexual, we'll say that much. McRae has somehow risen to the rank of DCI, where his days are full of meetings, forms and paperwork galore, but the endless Police Scotland budget cuts and COVID now have him out on the street where he can wreak the most havoc. He's living with the long-suffering Tara, herself in financial law enforcement, rarely seeing him come home in time for tea, between them having produced a daughter who of course is precocious. Outstanding among McRae's crew is constable Tufty, a spirited twit whom Logan treats as an ijit but who comes up with more than his share of bright ideas. The word 'unique' should be used on the rarest of occasions, but Tufty's syntax and grammar can only be described as such. Meanwhile DS Roberta Steel is simply one of the greatest and most bizarre characters in police fiction. This House of Burning Bones She was once McRae's boss and a DCI herself, though how she did it in a conservative paramilitary organization, MacBride never really explained. She was demoted after planting evidence to wrongfully convict the vilest of villains who kept getting away with it. McRae is a sperm donor for Steel and her wife Susan's kids, and plays an active role in their lives. MacBride describes Steel as having a huge nose and a mass of gray hair somewhere between a Brillo pad and a briar patch. Slovenly would be a compliment; she slouches and flakes out while scratching herself in private places and adjusting her bra and unmentionables in front of everyone, constantly eating, smoking, vaping or all of the above at once. Her profanity is inspired by genius. While there is no sign she has ever been unfaithful to Susan, she hits on women in public, especially heterosexuals with far more power than she, including senior police officers, noting with glee the sexual wonders she can unleash in them if they will only consent. Some may note with delight or dismay that the book is 600-plus pages long, at a time too many authors think 280 pages will suffice. If you're into Stuart MacBride, his latest won't feel long enough. Bring your own sausage rolls and bacon butties. Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was in Aberdeen to get the ferry to Shetland. He thought it was nicely old, but who would trust anything an English-born person would say about Scotland?
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
A bottomless stream of pompousness
When it comes to streaming options, we are living in an age of abundance. That sounds good, right? But so much of this content is merely meh. This flood of middling series and movies, this glut of take-it-or-leave-it entertainment can lead to viewing inertia. The search for something truly compelling can feel so exhausting and overwhelming that decisions often get made more by the gravitational pull of the couch than by anything actually happening onscreen. Amidst this purgatory of TV that's not quite bad enough to give up but not quite good enough to truly hook you, streaming content can stand out by being great. By being original, intelligent, well-crafted — you know, all that hard stuff. Or, in what feels like a depressing confirmation of the crappiness of our 21st-century attention economy, it can stand out by being absolutely, excruciatingly awful. War of the Worlds, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 alien-invasion novel that sees security analyst Ice Cube staring at a computer screen for 91 minutes, could be 2025's definitive example of that second option. Currently showing on Prime Video, the movie — filmed during the COVID lockdown period and only now released straight to streaming — has been shellacked by critics, pummelled by audiences and fast-tracked onto Rotten Tomatoes' '100 Worst Movies of All Time' list. The movie's distinctive dreadfulness, however, has created its own kind of buzz. Now a flick that might have languished unnoticed in a sea of so-so slow-season offerings is grabbing media attention — and yes, I know I'm not helping — and racking up viewers. Currently ranked in Prime's top 10 numbers for Canada — it was No. 3 at one point — War of the Worlds is clearly drawing in people hoping to enjoy the must-see hate-watch of our long, hot, mediocre summer. Coming after Orson Welles' infamous radio play, a stalwart 1950s movie adaptation and Steven Spielberg's 9/11-inflected take, this version from music video and commercial director Rich Lee debuted with a zero score on Rotten Tomatoes and seems to have stalled out at three per cent, thanks to the addition of a single positive review. Over at Metacritic, the critical consensus is summarized as 'overwhelming dislike.' It's been called 'a disaster movie that's a disaster of a movie,' a 'cinematic atrocity for the ages,' an 'inept screensaver' and 'a film that dares to ask, 'What if a planet-wide alien invasion was just a series of awkward video chats?'' There are suggestions that the only reason for the film's existence is to become a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Even War of the Worlds' own promotional materials seem to confirm its abject terribleness. The poster's tagline is 'It's worse than you think,' which was presumably meant to refer to the alien influx of murderous mechanical tripods but in hindsight could be the marketing team sneakily leaning into the movie's only possible selling point. I overlooked War of the Worlds when it first dropped, but as reports of its stultifying stupidity started to spread, I tuned in, mostly out of morbid curiosity. Unfortunately, WotW is not bad in a goofy, watchable way, in a funny Sharknado way, in a so-bad-it's-good way. It's possessed by a particularly icky and exasperating and banal kind of badness, a quintessentially 2025 kind of badness. It's a stupid movie that thinks it's smart, a would-be serious movie whose 'ideas' are not just unformed but hypocritical, thanks to blatant corporate suck-uppery, comically obvious Amazon product placement and what amounts to a gratuitous Jeff Bezos fan-fiction plotline. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Governments can't save us in War of the Worlds, and not just because Ice Cube's security analyst is literally (literally!) the only employee in the entire Department of Homeland Security building when the creatures attack. These alien invaders have come to Earth to devour our data — which the movie calls 'our most precious resource' — but governments are too bloated and bureaucratic to respond. What we really need, according to War of the Worlds, are those tech disrupters, those move-fast-and-break-things guys in Silicon Valley, which is why key movie moments centre on self-driving Teslas and Amazon gift cards and Ring cameras and emergency Zooms. The most heroic action in the entire story involves an Amazon driver who's working through a global apocalypse and whose on-time drone delivery of a thumb drive will end up saving the world. ('Prime Air, the future of delivery!' he enthuses.) The government's overreaching surveillance is also critiqued, with characters remarking — several times! — that Washington, D.C., is 'way too worried about what's in people's Amazon carts.' That would be fine, except the script seems to imply that while government data collection is bad, data collection by our tech overlords gets a pass. I guess we might have to get used to drones delivering our packages. But I never want to get used to Amazon meddling with our movies. That, it turns out, is just bad-bad. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. 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Winnipeg Free Press
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- Winnipeg Free Press
Things to know about the indictment against the New Orleans mayor
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Months before New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell was set to leave office because of term limits, she has been indicted in what prosecutors allege was a yearslong scheme to conceal a romantic relationship with her bodyguard. Prosecutors say bodyguard Jeffrey Vappie was being paid as if he was working when he and Cantrell were really alone in apartments and visiting vineyards, hiding their communication by sending encrypted messages through WhatsApp and then deleting them. Although the pair have said their relationship was strictly professional, the indictment described it as 'personal and intimate.' The first female mayor in New Orleans' 300-year history has been charged with conspiracy, fraud and obstruction. Vappie was already facing charges of wire fraud and making false statements. He has pleaded not guilty. A grand jury returned an 18-count indictment Friday that added Cantrell to the case. The City of New Orleans said in a statement that it was aware of the indictment and that the mayor's attorney was reviewing it. Cantrell hasn't sent out a message on her official social media feed on X since July 15, when she said the city was experiencing historic declines in crime. She and her remaining allies have said that she has been unfairly targeted as a Black woman and held to a different standard than male officials. Here are things to know about the mayor and the indictment: Vineyard trips and alone time with bodyguard The indictment paints a detailed picture of Cantrell and her bodyguard traveling to vineyards and spending time alone in apartments at the same time it says Vappie was being paid as if he was working. Vappie reminisced in a WhatsApp exchange cited in the indictment about joining Cantrell in Scotland in October 2021, saying that was 'where it all started.' Cantrell had told local reporters she needed a security detail 'due to COVID,' saying her travel accommodations were 'a matter of safety, not of luxury.' The following year, instead of Cantrell attending a conference in Miami, authorities said the pair rendezvoused on Martha's Vineyard. Vappie's travel to the island was covered by the city to attend a separate conference. 'The times when we are truly (traveling) is what spoils me the most,' the mayor wrote to him that month. That same year, they also visited several California wineries, according to the indictment. After a 'trusted staff member' posted a photo of the three of them on social media, one of Cantrell's associates asked them to remove it. They met in an apartment while Vappie claimed to be on duty, and Cantrell arranged for him to attend 14 trips, Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Simpson said. The trips, he added, were described by her as times 'when they were truly alone.' In all, New Orleans taxpayers paid more than $70,000 for Vappie's travel, Simpson said. The pair used WhatsApp for more than 15,000 messages, including efforts to delete evidence, make false statements to FBI agents, 'and ultimately to commit perjury before a federal grand jury,' he said. A turbulent second term as mayor Cantrell, a Democrat, won a historic election in 2017 by portraying herself as a candidate for the people and not of the city's political class. Her mayoral tenure started strong with her securing tens of millions of dollars for city infrastructure improvements and taking decisive steps during the pandemic. There wasn't strong opposition to her 2021 election for a second term. But it was around that time that the wheels started to come off her administration. After Hurricane Ida pounded south Louisiana in 2021, residents were left without trash collection for weeks, while crime rates were surging. Meanwhile, Cantrell drew criticism for taking first-class trips abroad at the city's expense, violating a policy that requires city employees to use cheaper fares. She eventually agreed to repay the difference. A WVUE television investigation also found she was using a city-owned apartment as a part-time residence. Cantrell survived a recall campaign launched in 2022 by disgruntled Black Democrats and largely funded by wealthy white Republicans. She is also among more than 100 people brought up on corruption charges in Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans two decades ago, said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a watchdog group that provided photographs and information to federal authorities in the latest case. New Orleans' long history of corruption cases Although Cantrell is New Orleans' first mayor to be charged while in office, this is far from the first corruption case to impact the city. 'Public corruption has crippled us for years and years,' Simpson said. 'And this is extremely significant.' In 2014, former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced to a decade in prison for bribery, money laundering, fraud and tax crimes. The charges relate to actions during his two terms as mayor from 2002 to 2010. He was released early in 2020 during the pandemic. In 2022, Rodney J. 'Jack' Strain, a former Louisiana sheriff, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a federal bribery conviction. He also received four life sentences for earlier convictions for raping boys. After serving five terms, he admitted he used his authority as sheriff to steer profits from a $1 million work-release contract to himself, his family and two deputies. G. Thomas Porteous Jr., a federal judge from New Orleans, was impeached and removed from the bench after the U.S. Senate in 2010 determined he took money from attorneys and bail bondsmen and lied in a personal bankruptcy filing, among other offenses. He never faced criminal charges as a result of the probe, which ran from 1999 to 2007. He died in 2021.
