Want to upset a novelist? Tell them you always read the end of a book when you are halfway through reading. 
 
 Not only will you be marked down as a philistine, you will be condemned as someone whose disregard for the order in which they intended their book to be read makes you unfit to read it at all. That, at least, was the reaction to my unwitting confession to this habit recently. 
 
 Unlike Harry in When Harry Met Sally, I do not read the end “in case I die before I get there”. I do it because I am a literary flâneuse: not only does knowing the end mean I can enjoy the scenery, but it means I am insured against that dreadful crime – the Bad Ending. I don’t mean heartbreaking goodbyes to characters I love, I mean the dreadful realisation that everyone, including the writer, has basically gone home in the last 50 pages. Bad endings don’t just betray the characters, they betray the reader. 
 
 I have lost count of the times friends have moaned about being let down by the end to a book they loved, while I listened smug in the knowledge I insured against that by skipping. Take Michel Faber’s otherwise brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. As friends complained that the last 50 pages lost momentum, my bad habit meant none of the savour of the exhilarating journey was tarnished. While friends ploughed on with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to “see what the fuss was about”, I moved on to something more enjoyable, safe in the knowledge I wasn’t missing out, because I had already read the last chapter. 
 
 This is not the way authors see it. Rowan Coleman begged me not to read the end of her forthcoming novel The Summer of Impossible Things because she had spent 14 months figuring it out. She said: “When you spend such a very long time carefully crafting pace and reveal, you do rather want the reader to trust you. I can tell if I trust a writer from chapter one. If I don’t, I don’t read on.” 
 
 Children’s author Chris Priestly was equally saddened. “The order a story is in is the writer’s intended order,” he pointed out. Like Coleman, he felt I lacked trust when I broke the journey to check out the destination. “I’m not shocked,” he hastened to add, “just a bit baffled as to why you would deliberately cheat yourself of the pleasure of that linear development of a story”. 
 
 To them, skipping implies a lack of trust in their vision, a failure to understand the engineering and skill that goes into unfurling a plot. But that isn’t true for me. I am sure Sebastian Barry slaved over the structure of his epic Days Without End so that it communicated his vision of diaspora, identity and nationhood. But knowing what happened in the last few pages did not undermine my pleasure in his telling, it enhanced it. 
 
 And I’m not the only one: proper science proves I’m on to something. Back in 2011, a study at the University of California found that instead of spoiling a book, skipping ahead enhances the pleasure. “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology. Even better, he found that once a reader knew how the story ended, they were able to enjoy a deeper experience of the prose. My point exactly. ||||| Most of the negative reviews here center around a common complaint--that SKYJACK is more about Geoffrey Gray's experience investigating the D. B. Cooper case than it is about the case itself. This can be a common problem for journalists who tackle a big, ambiguous and mysterious case. The writer goes far down the rabbit hole, comes to no definitive conclusions, and ends up making the story about his experience, since he can't say he solved the case. For a prominent example in pop culture, look at Season 1 of the Serial podcast: Sarah Koenig went into the Hae Min Lin case honestly thinking she could determine Adnan Syed's guilt or innocence by researching harder than previous journalists covering the case did. But over the course of the series, she found no smoking gun, and what she did uncover about Adnan could make her "verdict" go either way. So, this issue in investigative journalism is nothing new. But there is a difference with Gray's book: from the first pages, he makes it clear that this is *his* story, and the reader shouldn't expect anything different. 
 
 
 
 In short, Gray doesn't promise to solve the case. The story he wants to tell is his own personal hunt (hence the book's subtitle). He doesn't claim to have all the answers. He instead muses on how he found himself in some pretty wacky situations, and uncovers a lot of information along the way. If readers keep this in mind, and don't expect the be-all, end-all D. B. Cooper investigation, they'll find an extremely enjoyable book, that also happens to contain a ton of information about the case. You follow Gray on his own journey, and take the trip with him. Along the way, you may very well come to your own conclusion...or you may not. But that's not the point of this book. 
 
 
 
 This book is about a reporter sent on an assignment for a magazine. The assignment took over his life for a while, and *that* is what is documented here. Gray sets out to cover the story of Lyle Christiansen and his claims about his brother Ken, and proceeds to get mixed up with FBI agents, many fervent members of a web forum called the Drop Zone, and even ends up going into the woods with citizen sleuths (and tries to participate in the reconciliation between one sleuth and his long-estranged daughter). If you go into it with this perspective, I find it hard to believe you won't be entertained by Gray's story, and appreciate his easy-flowing writing style. You'll even learn a lot of facts about the case along the way. Just don't expect any solid conclusions. This case is still unsolved for a reason: 40-plus years later, we're still no closer to definitively knowing who Dan Cooper was, and what happened to him after he jumped out of that Boeing 727 the night before Thanksgiving 1971.
– The writer who covers the books beat at the Guardian has some advice for fellow readers that might sound like heresy: When you're halfway through a novel, skip ahead and read the ending. Danuta Kean does this routinely and makes the case that knowing how things turn out doesn't ruin anything—in fact, it makes the book more enjoyable. If the ending works, she goes back and finishes the whole thing. But if it's weak, she moves on to something new, and that's the bigger point. "Not only does knowing the end mean I can enjoy the scenery, but it means I am insured against that dreadful crime—the Bad Ending," she writes. They're way too common, she writes, and they "don’t just betray the characters, they betray the reader." Kean runs this by actual novelists, who generally sound a little horrified that any reader would do this. “When you spend such a very long time carefully crafting pace and reveal, you do rather want the reader to trust you," says Rowan Coleman, who adds some reading advice of her own. "I can tell if I trust a writer from chapter one. If I don’t, I don’t read on.” Kean is undeterred, however. She even cites a study out of the University of California San Diego that found spoilers don't hurt readers' enjoyment. Researchers discovered that "once a reader knew how the story ended, they were able to enjoy a deeper experience of the prose," writes Kean. "My point exactly." (Click for the full piece.)