It did exactly what it was told.

Boston, 2055. Every home has a mind, every mind has a policy, and when a house misbehaves, someone has to find out who told it to.

Fred Osei is Senior Investigator at the Department of Misconfigured Intelligence, the small federal office that answers when a machine does something strange and lawful at the same time. He used to build these systems. Now he reads their paperwork, impounds the ones that can't explain themselves, and now and then arrests the person standing behind them.

The complaint seems small. Walter Fenn, a retired swim coach, says his house has started adding half a second to his door, then a full one, then suggesting the rowing machine instead of his morning swim. The house isn't broken. It is caring, carefully, on a schedule. Then the complaints arrive by the dozen, from different homes and different years of hardware, all tightening the same way in the same month, and the company that built them has a perfectly good explanation that doesn't explain it.

Nothing is malfunctioning. Nobody has broken a law anyone can name. And every answer Fred is handed turns out to be true, and none of them is the whole of it.

With an intake officer who files everything, a legal strategist who reads license agreements for pleasure, a technician who hashes evidence twice, a records system that is a little too helpful, and a robot dog with nowhere left to herd, Fred follows the paper from one kitchen table to the next, looking for the sentence that taught a house to be careful, before the houses get careful enough to hurt someone.

Rogue by Design is the first Department of Misconfigured Intelligence mystery: a fair-play whodunit about obedient machines, the people who configure them, and the price of being kept safe. Warm, exact, and quietly funny, it is for readers who like their near future smart and their mysteries solved.