Keeping the audience interested?

How do you keep the reader interested in your story? The options are limitless. Let's say there's a mystery in your story. Do you let the reader in on the secret from the beginning, or keep it hidden from them to the end? I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. What do you like best? To "be in on something" the character has to find out, or to be surprised at the end? I like to be surprised, so I like to keep the reader from knowing more information than the characters do. Sometimes that is hard, but I keep trying to put myself in their place to keep myself on center. But be careful to make sure all IS revealed in the end. One of my biggest pet peeves is when an author hints about an event in someone's past that affects the story and I read the whole thing to find out what it is, but it is never really explained. I read a story like that recently where the author kept giving clues or memories of some awful event in the main character's past that made her act the way she did in the present, but at the end, the author wrapped it up with something like "The events of her past were now laid to rest and she was finally able to move on." Wha---???? That book went in the trash and that author will never be read again.

Another technique that goes along with the surprise element is to throw a brief glimpse or a clue into the story at the beginning, and the reader wonders all along what that has to do with the story. For example, in one of my stories, there is a murder of an obscure person in England, but in the next scene, we are in California where a rare painting by Rembrandt is discovered by a college art professor. Totally unrelated events where the characters aren't connected in any way. But they are in the story for a reason. Everyone who has read that opening tells me they are crazy to find out what the connection is, so they read on.

These are just two ideas for keeping a reader interested in your story, but keep in mind, everyone's different and although one person could love your writing, another could hate it, no matter what you do. That's the nature of writing.