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Payoff for the Reader
By Any Other Name follows a struggling young writer who is horrified when she happens upon a novel in an airport bookstore that is certainly based on her own unpublished manuscript. What drew you to explore authorship and ownership through the structure of a mystery?
I found out last spring that my work had been included in one of the online datasets that had been illegally downloaded to train AI language models. So authorship and ownership were heavy on my mind as I was writing the story. It was a helpless feeling knowing that my work had been taken, and not knowing what (if anything) there was to be done about it, and I leaned into that in crafting a mystery that tried to answer those questions: How did this happen? What can I do about it?
Were there particular mystery writers or literary thrillers that influenced your approach?
I’ve listened to a lot of John Grisham audiobooks on road trips, but I admit I otherwise don’t generally read a lot of mystery/thrillers. I have a TON of respect for serial mystery writers, especially now that I have completed my own. It’s hard to be clever and come up with plot twists, red herrings, and “whodunits?” that readers don’t see coming. One thing that was stylistically important to me in writing this mystery was that it fit real life. I didn’t want my protagonist to have help from unlikely sources. No best friend who happened to have access to the DMV database. No dad who used to work for the FBI. No former college roommate who happened to be into surveillance. Just the tools that most of us would have at our disposal – like Google search and social media stalking.
Which scene was the most satisfying to write?
The reveal of who Beatrice Mitchell was was particularly satisfying because I knew it would be the payoff for the reader. It’s the moment they get to find out if any of their hunches are right, and I enjoyed crafting a scene that answered all the questions and tied up the loose ends (while still leaving some intrigue for the final 50 pages!) I also love writing a good breakup scene, and I got one of those in there, too.
The novel seems especially suited for book club conversations. What discussions do you hope it inspires?
The book is ultimately about authorship and creativity, and I think we live in a time where the importance of that (and what it even means to create or author something) is really being questioned and tested. I hope it inspires people to value the time, effort, energy, and heart that authors pour into their work, but maybe more importantly, I hope it inspires people to value the creative process as a whole – including how it shows up in their own life, the writing they do, and the stories they have to share. We now have the ability to have a textbox on the internet to tell our stories for us, and I hope people talk about the dangers of that. And I hope people resist. Not because AI is inherently evil all on its own, but because storytelling is the most innate thing we do as humans, and if we give that up, then who are we?
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Fresh out of her MFA program, she’s bombed an interview at Columbia, collected a stack of rejections from agents and publishers, and stalled out in a spiral of writer’s block. Meanwhile, her best friend is thriving in a PhD program, and her boyfriend is climbing the tech ladder.
Then a delayed flight pushes Jordan into an airport bookstore, and everything changes. On the shelf, she finds a debut novel: The Unbearable Weight of Secrets by Beatrice Mitchell. Just a few paragraphs in, her exhaustion turns to shock. The book isn’t just familiar. It’s hers: a manuscript she drafted, revised, and workshopped years earlier, but never published.
Stunned, Jordan launches a desperate search for answers. Who stole her work, and why? A critique partner who read an early draft? An ambitious classmate eager for a leg up? Her mentor, with the most access to her writing but the most to lose by risking her own, successful career? Or someone else entirely, a stranger who inexplicably knows Jordan’s voice as well as she does?
To reclaim her story, Jordan must be willing to risk everything: her relationship, her future career, and her already fragile belief in herself. Because unmasking Beatrice Mitchell isn’t just about justice. It’s about proving, once and for all, that Jordan Marlowe isn’t just chasing the dream of being a writer. She already is one.
By Any Other Name
By Any Other Name, by Kate Laack, is a contemporary literary mystery about Jordan Marlowe, a stalled young writer who finds a published novel in an airport bookstore and realizes, with growing horror, that it is almost certainly based on her own unpublished manuscript. What begins as a personal search for the person who stole her story becomes a wider look at authorship, ambition, artistic insecurity, and the uneasy place where creativity meets technology.
I liked how grounded the book feels, even when the premise takes a strange turn. Jordan’s panic is not treated like melodrama. It feels physical and believable, the kind of disbelief that would make you reread the same page again and again just to prove you are not imagining it. Laack gives the story the shape of a mystery, with suspects, clues, awkward conversations, and red herrings, but the emotional pull comes from Jordan’s bruised confidence. She’s not only trying to prove that the book is hers. She’s trying to prove that her voice matters.
The author also makes some smart choices in how she handles the larger ideas. The book could have become a lecture about AI, publishing, and plagiarism, but it stays close to Jordan’s hurt, confusion, and anger. That makes the bigger questions easier to sit with. I found myself thinking less about abstract debates and more about the quiet terror of seeing something deeply personal removed from your name and handed to the world without you. The pace is strong, the conversations are sharp, and the book has a satisfying sense of momentum.
What I appreciated most is that By Any Other Name understands writing as more than output. It’s memory, doubt, effort, ego, longing, and revision. It’s also the strange courage of putting your name on something before anyone else agrees that it deserves to exist. I would recommend this novel to readers who enjoy contemporary fiction with a mystery engine, especially book lovers interested in creative ownership and the personal cost of chasing validation. It would also make a strong book club pick because the central question is simple but sticky: who gets to claim a story, and what happens when the answer is not as clean as we want it to be?
Pages: 280 | ASIN : B0G44DPVN4
