JCO Book Club

Culpability is a suspenseful family drama that asks a defining question of our era: what does moral responsibility look like in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence? The novel opens with a collision - an autonomous minivan, an oncoming car, and a single moment that fractures the Cassidy-Shaw family. Seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, his father Noah beside him, while in the back seat Alice and Izzy scroll through their phones as their mother, Lorelei, an international leader in AI, works intently on her device. But each of them carries a private secret, and those secrets bind them all to the tragedy in quietly devastating ways.

As the family retreats to the Chesapeake Bay to recover, the moral questions pile up faster than the answers. A routine police investigation threatens Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy grow strangely evasive. Lorelei’s behavior turns opaque, stirring Noah’s fears that the…