CULPABILITY

A family heading to their son’s high school lacrosse game is thrown into chaos when their self-driving minivan is involved in a fatal accident.

Medieval historian-turned-novelist Holsinger seems to have created his own subgenre of psychosocial thriller, spinning super-smart, propulsive page-turners out of zeitgeisty worries like ultracompetitive school admissions (The Gifted School, 2019), disaster relief (The Displacements, 2022), and now, to absolutely crushing effect, artificial intelligence. On the Cassidy-Shaw family’s way to a weekend tournament on the Eastern Shore of Delaware, paterfamilias Noah is working on a legal memo in the front passenger seat; his 17-year-old son, Charlie, is at the wheel. In the back seat are Alice, 13; Izzy, 11; and their mom, Lorelei, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner who studies the ethical concerns raised by AI. And one is about to unfold before their very eyes when Alice suddenly screams, Charlie jerks the wheel, and they crash into a Honda Accord coming in the other direction. After this explosive opener, the complexities just keep coming—each person in the car has reason to believe the accident was really all their fault. Meanwhile, the Delaware state police have their own ideas about that, ones they continue to pursue even after the family retreats to a vacation rental on the Chesapeake Bay for a week. AI threads through the plot in so many fascinating ways—one of the kids is confiding all her secrets to a chatbot; the vacation rental is a smart house located across the cove from the over-the-top compound of a billionaire AI entrepreneur; a search-and-rescue is managed by drones; almost every time something bad happens, someone staring at a phone was involved. Cleverly threaded through the story are excerpts from Lorelei’s monograph, “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” that sharpen the philosophical and moral issues of the novel.

If you are not already hooked on Holsinger, it’s time to join the club.