I've been building a literary crime thriller with AI here's Chapter One. Brutal feedback welcome.
Been working on a concept I genuinely couldn't shake: a foster child on a remote Irish island in the 1990s who may or may not be responsible for the quiet, untraceable deaths of every member of his new family. One by one. Ruled accidents. Every single time.
The book is called "To Kill a Cuckoo Bird" named after the bird that survives by laying its eggs in other nests and letting other parents raise its young. Except the cuckoo chick doesn't just freeload. It pushes the other eggs out. It exhausts the host until there's nothing left.
The detective is a 47-year-old woman named Maeve Connelly, assigned from Dublin, arriving after the third death. She's not there to arrest anyone. She's there to understand something nobody on the island wants understood.
The suspect is eleven years old.
Here's Chapter One. I want to know:
Does the atmosphere land or does it feel forced?
Is Maeve a character you'd follow for 300 pages?
Where does the prose lose you?
Don't be kind. Be useful.