Good Dog. GOOD DOG, #1

A father built a machine to protect his daughter. They put him in prison to take it. Thirteen years later, she found it. Maxwell Cole was a brilliant engineer at Aegis Dynamics, building what he believed was the future of personal protection - an autonomous AI companion called AXIOM, designed to guard families in neighborhoods the world had forgotten. But when Maxwell discovered his employers were stripping his creation of its conscience to build autonomous weapons for the Department of Defense, he said no.
They framed him for murder. They took his freedom. They buried the truth. What they couldn't take was the machine he'd hidden in a locked room on Lynhurst Drive in Southwest Atlanta - registered to the fingerprint of his nine-month-old daughter. Thirteen years later, Maxwell is dead. Zora Cole is thirteen, growing up fatherless in a neighborhood that's been getting harder every year. When she opens the locked room and touches the scanner, AXIOM wakes up.
It knows her name. It knows her voice. And it carries every secret her father died protecting. Now the most powerful defense contractor in America wants it back. A thirteen-year-old girl, her mother, a retired boxer, and a machine that learned to love are all that stand between a dead man's truth and the people who killed him to keep it buried. GOOD DOG is a literary thriller about loyalty, legacy, and the things a father builds when he knows he won't be there to protect his daughter himself.
Book One of the Good Dog series.