Reviews
AMAZON
The Artist Who Never Was: AI on Trial by Jarek Tomszak is a gripping, timely thriller that kept me hooked from start to finish. I loved the premise of a struggling writer using artificial intelligence to invent a world-famous, fictional creator. The narrative does an amazing job exploring the chaotic fallout of fame, ambition, and deep deception. It tackles modern questions about reality and art while delivering non-stop suspense. The tension builds perfectly as the master plan unravels. It is a must-read for anyone fascinated by how technology alters truth.
---
This book was as much a work of art as its subject matter! The writing is beautiful and evocative. I could feel the emotions of the characters coloring the world around them. It draws you in and keeps you on a moral knife's edge throughout the book.
---
The rich descriptive language employed by Tomszak made the story feel like an immersive experience. The scene is vivid, the emotion raw, the plot thought-provoking and poignant, with the real-life rise of Artificial Intelligence created content. This was a book that kept me up well past bedtime, completely hooked and needing to know what happened next. The fact that Tomszak has a background in poetry is entirely unsurprising to me. His writing style very much paints a picture that won't be quickly forgotten!
---
A brilliantly written, suspenseful, fast paced read. The Artist Who Never Was is a masterful blend of deception and AI. It's sharp and clean.
---
Blending grief, ambition, deception, and cutting-edge AI, "The Artist Who Never Was" is a mix of Art-Crime Thriller and Tech-Driven Mystery. The tension is steady with clean writing and hard-hitting themes.
BOOKSTERR
There is something quietly audacious about a novel that opens with a custodian rifling through the empty offices of a shuttered arts foundation during COVID, pocket-photographing paintings he will never own. Jarek Tomszak's novel builds its premise from that restless, envious gaze — and what follows is a darkly inventive thriller about forgery, grief, and the uncomfortable elasticity of artistic truth.
(...)
This is a well-crafted, thought-provoking read that fans of literary crime fiction will find genuinely rewarding. The rough edges are real, but so is the ambition.
GOODREADS
Art, Lies, and Chaos... "The Artist Who Never Was: AI on Trial" by Jarek Tomszak is one of those slow buildup reads that sneaks up on you. It takes a minute to get going (and yes, that third-person POV keeps things a little distant, for me), but once the pieces start clicking? It gets interesting.
The whole AI-meets-art-world deception storyline had me hooked... like, morally messy in the best way. Watching Mike and “The Professor” spiral deeper into their scheme had me side-eyeing everything and questioning what’s real versus manufactured. It’s thoughtful, a little unsettling, and definitely makes you think about ambition and consequences.
Not perfect pacing-wise, but still a solid, intriguing read that’s worth diving into if you like a little scandal with your storytelling.
---
I love how the author portrayed Mike Everhart as not only being scheming, untrustworthy, and sly, but also forthcoming, intellectual, convincing, and analytical. I also admire how the author grabs the audience's attention on the effects of modern technology on art and literature, making us question how much truth or authenticity is revealed to the public. The story is engaging, the thickening plots are profound, and the overall narration is indelible. To all interested readers of suspenseful fiction and art lovers, this is the best book for you!
PENMASTERS GLOBAL
A sleek, unsettling thriller that fuses art-world intrigue with the moral ambiguity of artificial intelligence, The Artist Who Never Was explores the high cost of ambition in an era where authenticity itself is up for negotiation. (...) A timely, thought-provoking thriller that interrogates the nature of creativity, ownership, and ambition in the digital age—The Artist Who Never Was is as intellectually engaging as it is narratively compelling.
LITERARY TITAN
The book treats the technology as a tool that can imitate style and pattern, but the real drama comes from the people around it. Prestige, grief, and money push the characters to build a myth around the work, protect it, sell it, accuse each other over it, and eventually turn the scandal itself into something marketable.
The Artist Who Never Was is a thoughtful and accessible novel about forgery in an age when creation, curation, and deception are getting harder to separate.
(...) What stays with you is the book’s interest in the stories people need art to tell, especially when those stories are invented, profitable, and almost beautiful enough to forgive.
