Book of the week: Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

(Crown, $25)

Talk about “priceless publicity,” said Greg Schneider in The Washington Post. Days before Geoffrey Gray’s new book about the 40-year search for notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper hit the shelves, along came Marla Cooper. The 48-year-old sales executive had recently told the FBI that her late uncle may have been the man who leapt into crime legend when, on a rainy night in 1971, he parachuted from a Reno-bound commercial jet while carrying $200,000 in ransom money. Cooper’s disappearance, literally into thin air, marks the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history. Gray, a writer at New York magazine, has delved into the “weird, weird world” of possible suspects and zealous Cooper enthusiasts to deliver a deeply entertaining if somewhat tangled tale that’s part reconstruction of the original case and part the account of an author’s “descent into the heart of obsessive darkness.”

Cooper’s revelation was another in a long line of bizarre leads, said Phoebe Connelly in NPR.org. In the decades since D.B. Cooper took his seat on that fateful flight, the story “has grown thick with glory hounds putting themselves forward as witnesses, numerous debunked deathbed confessions, incorrigible investigators working with scant and outdated information, and amateur sleuths who gather to endlessly ponder the case.” Gray, who was unfamiliar with the case before hearing the tale spun in a bar by a former itinerant preacher, falls in with the obsessives, meticulously assembling a concise history of the case while pursuing leads of his own. If Gray occasionally “lets his hard-boiled prose get the better of him,” he makes up for his stylistic excesses with a wealth of interesting detail.

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Gray’s book on this criminal daredevil “supersedes the dozen or so previous ones by being more comprehensive,” said Roger K. Miller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As the first reporter to be granted access to the FBI’s massive file on Cooper—which stretches across some 40 feet in the bureau’s Seattle offices—Gray introduces readers to some of the more intriguing “persons of interest” in that file, including Barbara Dayton, a pilot who, two years before the hijacking, underwent gender reassignment surgery to become a woman. Though “occasionally irritating,” Gray’s “enthusiasm for the chase is mostly infectious.” Like the FBI, which recently declared Marla Cooper’s story inconclusive, the author comes away empty-handed. The manhunt, it seems, continues. Gray might make you want to join the search.