I Read a Dozen Books a Month for My Job—and This Is the One I'm Recommending to Everyone This Summer

As Real Simple’s contributing books editor, I read for a living. This means combing through the tons of books that come out each month to decide what to recommend to our readers. It’s always hard to whittle down the list (there are so many good ones!), but a few times a year a book blows me away to such a degree that I can’t stop telling my friends about it, chatting it up on social media, and thinking about it while I’m walking my dogs or doing the dishes. This summer, that book is Culpability by Bruce Holsinger.

The novel opens on a Maryland highway, where the Cassidy-Shaw family is traveling to a lacrosse tournament. The eldest child, Charlie, who’s just finished high school, is the star of his team and has committed to playing at the University of North Carolina in the fall. He’s in the driver’s seat of the car…but he’s not exactly driving, because their minivan is a SensTrek, a (fictional) state-of-the-art self-driving vehicle. Noah, the dad, is riding shotgun and typing away on his laptop. Lorelai, the mom, a renowned leader in artificial intelligence, is busy working in the backseat. The family’s two tween daughters, Izzy and Alice, are engrossed in their screens. Suddenly, their minivan collides with an oncoming car. The Cassidy-Shaws all survive, but the elderly couple in the other vehicle are killed.

How did it happen? Who’s at fault? If the car was self-driving, can Charlie be held responsible? Isn’t the whole point of this technology to keep accidents from happening at all?

These are the dizzying questions plaguing the family when they head to a vacation rental on the Chesapeake Bay a few weeks later to rest and recover from the accident. Noah is trying to normalize things as much as he can, despite the looming police investigation that threatens his son’s future. Yet it’s impossible to drown out the moral dilemmas that have changed the family. On the one hand, if they didn’t fully control their car—if they’d given up their autonomy in favor of technology that was supposed to be safe and reliable—how can they be held accountable? On the other hand, two people are dead.

The provocative questions only become more complicated and compelling when Noah and Charlie paddleboard by the neighbor’s property in the cove next door, and discover that it’s owned by a famous tech billionaire. It doesn’t take Charlie more than a minute to notice the billionaire’s gorgeous daughter standing on the shoreline. Less than 24 hours later, the two teens fall headfirst into a summer romance, and that’s when Noah notices his wife’s odd behavior. Does she know the tech mogul next door through her work? In what way?

As the week slowly passes, amid swimming and family dinners, glasses of wine and pitchers of lemonade, it starts to become clear that each of the Cassidy-Shaws is holding on to secrets that could implicate them in the crash.

Culpability is a family drama and a thriller, a heartwrenching emotional story and a meditation on our digital age. It’s the kind of novel I love to recommend because it will appeal to every kind of reader—your book club will love it, as will your neighbors, your parents, and the teenagers in your life. Its cinematic storyline will have you by the throat and keep you furiously turning the pages, all while making you ask big questions about how our technology is intersecting with our humanity.

This is the book you’ll be desperate to talk about while you’re beside the pool, and dying to press into somebody else’s hands once you’ve closed the final, chlorine-splattered page. It’s the most of-the-moment novel I’ve read all year, and it’s the book of the summer.