One of our own, Lake Tahoe resident Ivan Carl, has just debuted his first novel, The Equation, a conspiracy thriller that launched September 1.
“I live on the lake and love our local community,” Carl says. “I’ve always liked solving big, complicated problems and hunting for the simplest answer that still holds. And I don’t think there’s anything more complicated than the human experience and the pursuit of happiness. My engineering brain has been working on that one for decades. When I finally settled on the equation at the center of the book, I got genuinely excited, and I wanted to share it with everyone I could.”
About the book
The most dangerous secret in the world isn’t a weapon. It’s an answer.
Nathan Brooks is a mathematician who has optimized every variable in his life. Career, routine, productivity. And still he 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 is 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 everyone 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 next to be silenced.
In the tradition of The Da Vinci Code and The Alchemist, The Equation is a conspiracy thriller with real intellectual stakes, asking the most dangerous question of all: what if someone solved the secret to a meaningful life, and the world’s most powerful people would kill to keep it buried?
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Inspirations for the story
“When I lived in Peru twenty-five years ago, I was struck by how content people in our village were, despite very limited resources,” Carl says. “Back home in the US, people with so much more often seemed restless and unhappy. Why? That question stuck with me for decades.
“The Equation is the product of trying to answer it: what actually makes a life content? I don’t hand readers the answer. Instead, I challenge them to run a diagnostic on their own lives through the lens of the equation.
“Mostly, I hope readers close the book and quietly ponder their own lives. If someone takes a long walk a week later, still thinking about the equation, then the book has done its job.”
You can find The Equation at local bookstores, on Amazon, or at ivancarl.com.
