What makes an answer good?
Edie Marsh evaluates the answers produced by an advanced AI system. Her job is to decide whether they are accurate, useful, safe-and satisfying.
Then her grandmother dies and leaves behind something unexpected: decades of letters sent to "Aunt Verity," the advice columnist Ruth secretly was.
As Edie reads through the archive, she discovers that her grandmother faced the same problem Edie faces every day:
People rarely ask only what they appear to be asking.
Some want information. Some want permission. Some want comfort. Some simply want to know that someone has understood.
And sometimes the most dangerous answer is the one that sounds perfectly right.
Moving between a small-town advice column and the world of modern artificial intelligence, A Good Answer is a novel about family, responsibility, technology, and the questions we entrust to other people.
Because a good answer is more than a correct one.