Why You'll Love This
A self-driving car crashes, everyone in the family is secretly at fault, and no one will say so — that tension holds for 350 pages.
- Great if you want: family drama sharpened by ethical questions about technology and accountability
- The experience: tightly wound and claustrophobic — a pressure cooker in vacation-home packaging
- The writing: Holsinger rotates perspectives cleanly, letting each character incriminate themselves slowly
- Skip if: you want plot over moral wrestling — this lingers in discomfort deliberately
About This Book
When an autonomous vehicle driven by seventeen-year-old Charlie Cassidy-Shaw collides with another car, the question of who is truly responsible shouldn't be complicated — except that every member of his family was distracted, everyone has something to hide, and their mother happens to be one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence. Holsinger uses this single, shattering moment to excavate something far more unsettling than a car accident: the ways families protect themselves over each other, and the particular moral vertigo of living inside technology we don't fully understand or control.
What makes Culpability distinctive is how precisely Holsinger manages point of view — moving through five family members without ever letting the reader fully trust any of them. The prose is clean and propulsive, but the architecture underneath is intricate, each chapter quietly reframing what came before. Holsinger is genuinely interested in ideas — about culpability, about AI, about the contracts between parents and children — and he trusts readers to sit with questions that don't resolve neatly. This is domestic fiction with real intellectual weight behind it.