Culpability
2025
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is behind the wheel with his father, Noah, riding shotgun, while his younger sisters are absorbed in their phones in the back seat and his mother, Lorelei, a leading AI researcher, is buried in her own work. Every member of the family turns out to be hiding something that implicates them in the crash, and during a week of recuperation at the Chesapeake Bay, they’re forced to reckon with the moral fallout, from a police investigation threatening Charlie’s future to Noah’s growing suspicion that Lorelei is concealing a darker truth, one tangled up with a tech mogul from her past.
This was a genuinely fun read that also dug into some deep questions: who’s actually at fault when AI fails, how much we should trust the systems we’re handing our lives over to, and who gets to decide what data shapes those systems in the first place. The mystery leaned on more than a few convenient coincidences along the way, which normally bothers me, but here they paid off in ways that felt necessary rather than lazy. I’d recommend it both as a page-turning mystery and as a smart, balanced look at where AI ethics might be headed.
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