Culpability tries to be both a serious ethical inquiry and a page-turning thriller, but it falls short on both counts. The legal framework is too vague to allow the reader to really evaulate the moral dilemma, and the thriller elements are too formulaic to work as entertainment.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The autonomous vehicle at the center of the story is established as a Level 3 system — meaning the driver is required to stay attentive and be ready to take control. This is not a minor detail. There’s a world of legal difference between that and a fully self-driving Level 4/5 system. Under Level 3 rules, Charlie was responsible for that wheel. The fact that he was texting instead of watching the road makes his panicked intervention not a mitigating factor — it’s the whole ball game. Liability points at Charlie. Yet the novel’s legal resolution blames the AI, with no real explanation for how it got there.
What makes this worse is that the story goes out of its way to establish how extensively the car and the family’s phones were tracking everything. That data existed. It could have told us exactly what happened and why the legal outcome was what it was. Instead, the actual mechanics of the accident are never clearly explained — which is a strange omission for a book so focused on accountability.
A novel called Culpability should give you all the information you need to think for yourself, and needs to explain outcomes – whether they are sensible or not. This one did neither.