Author R&R with Ivan Carl

Ivan Carl is an engineer, educator, and lifelong traveler whose stories begin with questions that refuse to let go. His travels around the world have sparked a lasting curiosity about human behavior, the systems we create, and the choices that shape our lives. Whether exploring unfamiliar places or unexpected ideas, Ivan is drawn to the moments that challenge assumptions and reveal new ways of seeing the world. He continues to travel with his wife and children, always collecting experiences, conversations, and questions that inspire his work.

His new thriller, The Equation, follows Nathan Brooks, a mathematician who has optimized every variable in his life - career, routine, productivity - and still can't say why none of it feels like enough. Then he finds his mentor dead in a locked office, two words written in blood on the floor: THE EQUATION. The drawers are empty. The files are gone. And the brass key in Nathan's pocket is the only thing the killers didn't find.

What Nathan uncovers is a forty-year trail of suppressed research hidden across monasteries, tide archives, and communities quietly living proof that modern life has the variables wrong. At the center of it all: a formula - not for wealth or power, but for human contentment. A formula that works.

That's the problem.

For two centuries, an organization called The Continuum has erased it, silencing seventeen people who came close to sharing it. Now Nathan - with a defected operative at his side - must decode what his mentor died protecting and release it to the world before he becomes the eighteenth name on a list no one was ever meant to see.

Ivan Carl stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:

The Engineer Who Tried to Solve for Happiness

I've always liked solving big, complicated problems and solving for the simplest answer that still holds. I don't think there's anything more complicated than the human experience, and the whole messy pursuit of happiness. My engineering brain has been working on that one for decades.

The concept of what shapes human contentment has been on my mind since we lived in Peru twenty-five years ago. I carried the question for a long time after, without any idea it would become a novel.

The moment it did become the seeds of a novel came much later, in the North Cascades. I was hiking, turning the question over in my brain, and my instinct was to simplify it. To reduce it to something essential. To see if the pursuit of contentment could be written down the way you'd write any other relationship between variables. When I finally settled on the equation that sits at the center of the book, I got genuinely excited. I wanted to share it with everyone I could.

The trouble with a message like that is nobody wants to be handed a formula for how to live. So I asked myself a different question: how do you get people to want it? I've always loved a great thriller, the kind you can't put down. It occurred to me that if a formula for human contentment really existed, someone powerful would want to bury it. And there it was. The philosophy could ride inside the chase. I could smuggle a real question about how to live into a story people would want to churn through on a plane.

That became the rule I wrote by: the idea can never stop the momentum. Every philosophical beat had to be earned by tension, a revelation while running for your life, not a lecture in a quiet room. Whenever a passage got too heady, I asked whether a reader on that plane would keep turning pages. If the answer was no, it got cut or it got faster. The thriller is the delivery system. The idea is the payload.

In the end, what I'm really after isn't that a reader agrees with the equation. It's that they close the book and quietly run their own idea of an equation, what's actually working in their life, what's just noise, what they might already have and haven't noticed, what they're grateful for.

If someone takes a long walk a week after finishing, still pondering the equation and their own life, then the book has done its job.

 

To learn more about Ivan Carl and his writing, visit his website and follow him on Facebook. The Equation is now available via Amazon and on Audible.