A family of five happily embarks on a trip to a sporting event as “Culpability” opens. The vibe of fun and innocence lasts for precisely four pages.

That’s when their self-driving automobile, with teenager Charlie Cassidy-Shaw in the pilot seat, smashes into a car, killing its two elderly occupants and injuring all of the Cassidy-Shaws. Charlie is so badly hurt that his lacrosse scholarship to the University of North Carolina is in jeopardy. In the aftermath, they’re trying to heal from the trauma at a Chesapeake Bay beach house, where we begin to realize that each of the five, even grade school student Izzy, has reason to believe the crash was their fault.

“Culpability” is not a thriller — it’s in the cracks-in-a-family-emerge genre of “Ordinary People” and “Before and After” — but, with all of the unfolding secrets and ominous hints of something nefarious at the Chesapeake Bay mansion next door, it is a propulsive, difficult-to-put down novel.

This is maybe the place to confess that I get a lot of pitches for books, usually nonfiction, dealing with artificial intelligence and I usually delete them because, although I know I’m already benefiting from AI, it freaks me out a little. If I had known how much AI has to do with “Culpability,” I might have nixed it but I’m glad I didn’t because I was riveted by its portrait of the sneaky, helpful-but-not-always way AI has wormed its way into our lives.

We know from the beginning of the book that Charlie’s mom, Lorelei, is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who studies the ethics of AI. It also turns out that the family’s billionaire neighbor, whose helicopter keeps them awake nights, is heavily invested in AI. Even the family’s day-to-day activities — selecting music on their virtual assistant, texting with a friend — depend on virtual help they’re not even aware they’re using.

That makes “Culpability” sound Stephen King-esque. It’s not violent in the way a King book would be but there’s an insidiousness to how imperceptibly the family member’s lives are changing and to their helplessness in the face of it. The best kind of suspense usually comes from realistic situations where we are, as the title hints, somehow culpable for the bad things that happen to us, and that’s true here. The car accident may be out of the family’s control (or maybe not) but everyone makes small, seemingly logical decisions that add up to a Jenga tower of bad choices.

Holsinger, whose previous novels include “The Gifted School,” is adept at capturing the tiny errors humans in the same family can make, thinking they’re protecting each other. Parental decisions that narrator Noah dictates without consulting wife Lorelei, phone calls from the police that Charlie nervously avoids, secrets that daughters Alice and Izzy keep because they’re afraid they’ll get them in trouble. You needn’t have been in a trauma such as a fatal car wreck to recognize these people, who are blessed with the illogical logic we all sometimes fall victim to.

What “Culpability” says is that we need to confront that logic, that our world is more delicate than we realize and that, with the turn of a wheel, it all can change.

“Our thoughts are the same,” Noah says of his wife. “That life is profound and precarious, that a family of five can be cruising along in a minivan one minute and be hurling down an embankment the next, that even a strapping Division I lacrosse recruit can drown in an eddy, that the only certainty in life is the certainty of death.”

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Culpability

By: Bruce Holsinger.

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 340 pages.

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