Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
It’s a rare treat to read a novel so well written and finely crafted as Culpability.
Noah, the husband, narrates the story from the first-person point of view. As an author, I can only wish I could turn a phrase as well as the author, Bruce Holsinger. He weaves a contemporary family suspense novel about blame, secrecy, and moral responsibility.
Appealing to me, from another angle, it is steeped in qualms regarding artificial intelligence.
It begins after the family’s autonomous-driven minivan crashes into another car, leaving the family shaken and each member potentially implicated in what happened.
Seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat when the vehicle crashes; his father, Noah, is beside him, while his mother Lorelei—a leading AI researcher—and Charlie’s younger sisters are in the back. During the family’s subsequent stay on the Chesapeake Bay, a police investigation and the family’s hidden actions threaten Charlie’s future and the family’s cohesion.
Noah tries to protect the family, but he increasingly suspects that Lorelei’s behavior and her connection to a nearby tech billionaire conceal a larger danger. As the teenagers form their own alliances, secrets emerge, the novel turns to the question of “who caused the accident?” into a broader inquiry about what people owe one another when both humans and automated systems shape the consequences.
Holsinger treats AI, autonomous cars, corporate power, technology dependence, parenting, and adolescent vulnerability as engines of a propulsive domestic thriller rather than as abstract policy issues. It is less a conventional techno-thriller than a tense, morally complicated family novel—one in which small omissions and supposedly protective lies have escalating costs.
Highly recommend it.
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