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9. The Killer Touch by Ellery Queen

Wow!! What a book!!!

Here’s another entry in the Ellery Queen series, and another book picked out at random from my ebay box of mysteries. In this one, an off-duty cop goes on vacation on a very small tropical island. It’s so small, there are only four people there. Then hurricane season leaves them stranded there. So now you have four people stranded on a deserted island. I’d tell you what happens next, but I prefer not to reveal anything in case you run across this little potboiler yourself someday. Suffice it to say that the plot took me in a completely unexpected direction and I stayed up late into the night to find out what happened.

These Ellery Queen mysteries are the essence of good fiction. Introduce sharply-drawn characters, develop them just enough so you know who they are and how they will probably act when crisis strikes, and then turn ‘em loose in a creative, twisty plot. Anything extraneous is cheerfully jettisoned - these books have no epilogue, no postscript, no fade-out. The action continues right up until the last paragraph, and the plot sometimes isn’t resolved until the very last sentence.

This is the best book I’ve read since I joined this group in Jan of 2005.