A stranger asks her to take his photograph. Two hours later, her glove is in a dead man’s pocket.

Johnston Canyon, Banff, a December morning before first light. Seo-yeon has flown from Seoul to see where her favorite Korean drama was filmed. Jeong-ho, a math teacher with little English, has come because she asked. A man in a tan coat wants a picture with the canyon behind him. Before the morning is out, an ice climber is dead in the trees near the Lower Falls — and by evening the RCMP has asked the couple, politely, not to leave town.

Nearly three years earlier, in Calgary, a balcony fire put seven-year-old Chloe Holt in the hospital. She is relearning things that used to be easy. Her father, an electrician who is good with numbers, keeps counting what she has lost. Then, in the parking lot behind their building, he overhears a neighbor describe the glow he saw from his truck the morning of the fire — and what he decided not to do about it. Darren Holt does not confront him. Instead, he knocks on his door with a six-pack.

You will know who killed Craig Muller before the police do. The problem is explaining how he could have done it with a broken ankle and two recorded calls for help. Jeong-ho keeps going back to the moment Seo-yeon took the photograph at eight o’clock. Something about what he saw does not fit. Before he can help Sergeant Ray Fournier — a Mountie for thirty years — make sense of it, he has to find the English to explain it.  

At home, Darren helps Chloe with her homework. Six plus five still means counting on her fingers, and he waits without giving her the answer. His wife sits with them. She has no idea.

Told in two strands — eleven days in a Banff December, and the two patient years that led there — The Unsolvable Equation is a slow-burn crime novel about grief, self-deception, and what a bystander owes.

The first Banff Crime Novel.