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A review by lachesisreads
The American Gun Mystery by Ellery Queen
3.0
I very much enjoyed the other volumes in this classic mystery series so far, but this one was just a little too far fetched. The solution didn't convince me and I think the story would have been stronger if somebody else had been the murderer. It begins rather strongly but the end is a bit of a let down.
Some very interesting characters were introduced only to fizzle out later on, and we never learn what happens to the major characters after the last scene. We last meet them in the scene where someone is arrested, and then the story skips to a later time when Ellery Queen wraps up the case for a friend and none of the other characters are mentioned again.
Nor was it really the case in this volume that the reader had "all the pertinent clues to solve the case himself", which is always a fun challenge in the Ellery Queen books.
It certainly wasn't boring nor did I hate reading it, but it's not the strongest in the series. I would certainly recommend it to people who want to read all EQ books, but not necessarily if you just want to pick up a good old-fashioned hardboiled classic mystery.
Some very interesting characters were introduced only to fizzle out later on, and we never learn what happens to the major characters after the last scene. We last meet them in the scene where someone is arrested, and then the story skips to a later time when Ellery Queen wraps up the case for a friend and none of the other characters are mentioned again.
Nor was it really the case in this volume that the reader had "all the pertinent clues to solve the case himself", which is always a fun challenge in the Ellery Queen books.
It certainly wasn't boring nor did I hate reading it, but it's not the strongest in the series. I would certainly recommend it to people who want to read all EQ books, but not necessarily if you just want to pick up a good old-fashioned hardboiled classic mystery.