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Interesting thread.
In crime/mystery novels I feel that there is a sort of agreement with the writer. The reader does their best to follow all the details and try to solve the crime with the hero and the writer will try their best to misdirect your attention and lead you astray - but they must never cheat ... but sometimes they do, even the likes of Agatha Christie occasionally cheated (I'm thinking here particularly of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", it was very well done but I still felt cheated).
I see a number of accusations that Stephen King used deus ex machina, and I suppose he did in some cases, but mostly I think they had been enough part of the longer storyline to be acceptable at the end. However someone like Raymond Feist seems unable able to finish a book without such a god, sometimes quite literally - which was a shame because I quite like a lot of his books ... all the way through to the last few pages.
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