Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

I went into Culpability knowing almost nothing about it. I knew it had been an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and I knew it dealt with AI, which was enough to get me interested, because I’m drawn to stories that ask who is responsible when technology makes the decision for us. I’m not sure “morality” is exactly the right word for what I was looking for, but that was the itch I wanted scratched. The premise seemed to promise it: a family, a self-driving vehicle, a devastating accident, and the question of who actually bears the blame when a machine is behind the wheel. It sounded timely and a little unsettling, but what I got was a family drama that used AI as a backdrop, and that was not the book I thought I was picking up.

My biggest problem with Culpability is that I never believed it. The plot moves along on a steady supply of convenience. Information turns up exactly when it needs to, people make choices that serve the story rather than their own interests, and problems resolve themselves in ways that felt more like an author tidying up than events unfolding naturally. I can forgive a thriller for stretching the truth if it keeps me invested, but the more the coincidences stacked up, the more distance I felt from the story. Every time I started to sink into it, something would land too neatly and pull me right back out. Stories about AI depend on stakes that feel real, and it’s hard to worry about the future of technology when you don’t trust the present-day events of the book.

The family at the center of the story added to that frustration, mostly because of how many secrets they were all keeping. I’m not opposed to family secrets as a device, and there’s plenty of psychology to mine in why people hide things from the people closest to them, whether it’s shame, self-protection, or an attempt to control how others see them. But here it felt like every single person was hiding something, and eventually the secrecy stopped feeling like a portrait of one troubled household and started feeling like a mechanism for generating plot. As an outsider looking in, I kept wondering why nobody in this family could have one honest conversation, especially in the middle of a crisis where honesty would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. That’s the part that wore on me the most. When characters keep information from each other purely because the story needs them to, I stop seeing people and start seeing a set of dominoes waiting to be knocked over.

That also made it hard to care about the characters themselves. I wanted to understand how they were reacting to the accident and to each other, and I wanted their motivations to feel like their own. Instead, their decisions often seemed to exist so the next reveal could happen on schedule. When a book is asking me to consider how responsibility gets divided up, and how easy it is to hand off blame to someone or something else, I need to be invested in the people carrying that weight. I never quite got there.

Then there’s the ending, which left me with the question I was most curious about at the start: what was I supposed to take from all of this? The premise suggested a story about what happens when we trust AI with our lives, and I expected the book to land somewhere on that, whether it was a warning, a defense, or even a shrug. By the last page, I couldn’t tell you what the author wanted me to think. The AI angle felt like it was there to set the plot in motion, and then the family’s personal drama took over and left the bigger questions behind. If that ambiguity was intentional, it didn’t come across as a deliberate choice. It came across as a book that raised a big idea and then wasn’t sure what to do with it.

I do want to be fair about what worked as a concept. The idea of a family forced to reckon with an accident that no one can cleanly pin on a single person is a strong one, and it’s easy to see why the book attracted attention. The trouble is that a good hook only carries you so far. I wanted the ethical tension to drive the story, and instead it was the secrets, the coincidences, and the increasingly tangled family dynamics doing most of the work.

I’d recommend Culpability to readers who enjoy domestic dramas built around a family in crisis, and to people who like a story with a lot of hidden information to unravel. If you’re picking it up mainly for a thoughtful exploration of AI and moral responsibility, though, I’d adjust your expectations. It was not the timely, thought-provoking read I was hoping for.