Xi'an's Og

[I wrote a first draft of this journal post mid-December 2025, just before flying to Sevilla, and just realised now that I had not published it! Hence the bizarre title. As a weird coïncidence, this is the second post where I associate Knives out and guacamole… A post also served cold, then. And hopefully not stale!] Read the most recent Rankin’s Rebus (#25), Midnight and Blue, taking place in an Edinburgh jail, where Rebus has been locked for killing Big Ger Cafferty, after resurrecting him in Exit Music. (And not in Resurrection Men,  confusedly!) Which made me realise I had missed #24, A Heart Full of Headstones, and I ordered it on the spot! Hard to imagine such a setting could happen in real life, when Rebus mixes with people he contributed to send to jail… At such a degree of open association within jail! In the early pages I suspected Rebus was sent to jail as a ploy to uncover a criminal gang, but the murder of Cafferty sounded a serious enough accusation and none of the other characters were suspecting him of this. Apart from that, Midnight and Blue reads well and fast, if plagued as often by an unrealistic piling of coïncidences, convenient chance events, and character intersections.

Managed to confuse guacamole with soup while cleaning my freezer from long-time, anonymous, residents, which made the guacamole sour if manageable (with another ancient resident of said freezer, some octopus tentacles!).

Watched the third film in the Benoît Blanc series (Knives out), Wake Up Dead Man. Which was agaaaain of a Cluedo style, with caricatures of all characters, except for the punching priest, who manages to save the (soul of the) story, putting Blanc and his mannerisms in the background. If not in the grave (which remains a central piece of the scenario, along the church!)

This entry was posted on April 12, 2026 at 12:25 am and is filed under Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags avocado, Black Plague, book reviews, COVID-19, cuisine, Daniel Craig, Daniel Defoe, detective stories, draft, guacamole, Journal of the Plague Year, NSF, octopus, Russian invasion, Scottish crime novel, Sevilla, tartan noir, Ukraine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.