No sense of an ending: which books have lost the plot?

A disappointing denouement can ruin a novel, leaving readers feeling disappointed or even angry. Now’s your chance to vent your frustration – if you can stand the spoilers

Plot twists – or lack thereof – near the end of books can be a huge irritant to readers. “Life is too short to be spent reading bad prose,” said reader fingerlakeswanderer recently on our weekly Tips, links and suggestions blog, after forcing himself to finish reading a book, worried that he’s “become too lazy as a reader and give up on books too soon”:

I was reading Orient by Christopher Bollen, one of those big fat summer mystery books, and I had zipped through the first third of the book with no problem. Then it began to drag. Only my desire to know whodunnit was the reason that I slogged through about a hundred pages of going-nowhere story, and then felt rewarded when the last 200 pages went back to being a hoot to read. And then. The last forty pages annoyed the hell out of me. The murderer turned out to be someone that a reader could not possibly have guessed because there was one allusion to the existence of this person. It felt as if I had worked my way through 500 pages of prose to be told that “it had all been a dream” or “the murderer was a ghost” or some such BS ending.

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