Novelists generally like to wind things down and give some last thoughts, but in some cases, the last, unexpected twist is given on the very last page. Or the mystery is solved on the last page (especially if you thought you already had the solution)
And I mean literally the last page – not just “near the end”.
1.) Frederick Forsyth – The Devil’s Alternative – takes too long to explain, but the final mystery is cleared up at the very end (I think that the Day of the Jackal has a last twist near the end, but not really on the last page. It’s in the last minute of the movie, though.)
2.) Anthony Berkeley – the Poisoned Chocolates Case – I first learned of this through Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth, where he called it “a tour de force with no fewer than six separate solutions.” I thought he made it up, until I stumbled across a copy of the book. There are actually more than six solutions, as a club of amateur detectives strives to solve a poisoning case. the first few solutions proposed aren’t very convincing, but they become more definite as the book progresses, and you become convinced that the current solution is the correct one, until some new fact dislodges it and a new solution must be found. It’s an interesting comment o the trustworthiness of evidence and the assumptions we make. The solution is given in the last freakin’ line on the last page.
3.) Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Monster Men – pulls a happy ending out of what appears to be a real mess at the very end.
My copy’s packed away in a box somewhere, so I can’t easily check, but IIRC Carl Sagan’s Contact ends (as in, the very last line) with a very significant piece of information.
Is that the book the author famously sent to the publishers with the last word omitted, and causing the publisher to demand the last word so he could understand the book?
Not a novel, but in H. Beam Piper’s ( no relation ) short story, “He walked Around the Horses”’ there’s a twist in the very last line that ties much of the rest together.
Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with a final line that legitimately stunned me.
Sphere by Michael Crichton ends, I believe, with a final line that makes you realize that what you thought happened did not happen. They made a terrible movie out of it and removed the final twist that the last sentence threw at us.
Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line ends with the protagonist, a rogue time traveler, hiding out in the distance past and wondering whether the time authorities will simply erase him from existence, when suddenly the book just stops in the middle of the
The end of The Riddle Master of Hed completely blindsides the protagonist Morgan, revealing both that he’s been massively betrayed and the "High “One” he’s come to see is someone entirely different.
To make an analogy from another setting, it would be as if Gandalf led the Fellowship of the Ring to meet Galadriel, only when they meet in Lothlórien it is revealed on the last page that she was actually Sauron in disguise all along and Gandalf was always working for Sauron. Then the book ends.
I was going to mention The French Powder Mystery, but Exapno Mapcase ninja’ed me.
Several Doc Savage novels, including The Squeaking Goblin and Devil on the Moon end with the villian being revealed in the last couple of paragraphs or sentence.
) short story, “He walked Around the Horses”’ there’s a twist in the very last line that ties much of the rest together.