Unpublished Novel Pulled After $2.4M Deal Due to AI Authorship Concerns
A debut crime novel, Call Me, I'll Hide the Body, was sold to Minotaur/Macmillan for a reported $2.4 million including the follow-up, and has now been pulled over its author's suspected use of AI. The manuscript passed an initial check; the doubts resurfaced when the film and TV rights went to market. Sandy Hodgman, who handles foreign rights for Europa Content, withdrew the submission from international publishers, writing that the manuscript had dazzled buyers worldwide but that nobody could authenticate the evolution of the writing or substantiate the earlier assurances that no AI tools were involved. The New York Times, which broke the story, says it appears to be the first commercial novel from a major house pulled over evidence of AI use. It follows Mia Ballard's Shy Girl, cancelled in the US and discontinued in the UK after readers catalogued the tells. Note the mechanism that actually caught it: not a detector, but a provenance question nobody could answer.
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