The Finishing Stroke

By: Ellery Queen

Narrated by: Mark Peckham

During the 11 nights before Christmas, the strange gifts and the warnings came. Ellery Queen was there. The police were there. But no one saw the messenger. Ellery Queen knew that the sinister gifts held the clue to the mystery. But what did they mean, and who was the intended victim? Then on the 12th night of Christmas, the last clue led straight to the corpse....

©1958 Ellery Queen (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

Not the best

Overall a decent book but it feels just too long. The story gets repetitive. Read this book as one of the last after you finished with the other great books of Ellery.

Great Story

I enjoyed this book. I was shocked a couple of times when the bad language went too far but the overall story was very good.

Classic Ellery Queen!

This was a lot of fun to listen to, especially over the Christmas holidays. The narrator was outstanding, and added drama to the story, or just the right places in doing different character voices.

A Christmas Puzzler

There are several indications that Queen meant for this to be his last book featuring writer and detective Ellery Queen. For one, there's the title. And the story harkens back to the very first Queen mystery, The Roman Hat Mystery. And in the story, EQ is having a hard time coming up with a book, thinking that 30 novels is enough for any author. Luckily, there were several Queen novels that followed this, many of them very, very good. The Finishing Stroke is essentially a Christmas mystery taking place over three time periods. It begins in 1905 and describes the events leading up to the birth of John Sebastian. The bulk of the story takes place over the holiday period of 1929 / 1930 and is the mystery concerning the 12 nights of Christmas and the sinister presents given to John along with cryptic messages meant to indicate his death on 12th Night. Skip 27 years into the future to where Ellery is given the Sebastian file and remembers the events and correctly solves the crime. We're even given the old Challenge to the Reader one last time, although good luck solving this one!

One of his best

I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery up to the very end. Mark Peckham is an amazing narrator , always does a great job. This is an outstanding example of a crime solving and the power of reasoning that goes with it. Enjoy!