In 2024 Jae-won Chung, a Korean-Canadian NATO psychiatrist in Brussels, receives an anonymous package—coordinates, a photograph, a paper trail pointing to Kamchatka. His parents disappeared in a plane crash there thirty years ago. He believes that they are dead.

They are not.

The novel moves on two timelines. In the present, Jae-won travels north through volcanic Kamchatkan terrain with Kira—a guide from the local Itelmen people who knows more than she discloses—trying to find out what happened to his parents. In the past, his mother Soon-yi—a Korean-Canadian journalist—survives the crash and chooses not to return home. She has found a community of remote Russian people whose presence in an unmapped valley is about to be erased by a resource extraction company. She spends thirty years building the legal and ethnobotanical record that will protect them. This is the story that Jae-won is walking toward.

Detective of the Morning Calm is about what gets carried and what gets left behind. Jae-won carries dissociation, a condition he has diagnosed in others for twenty years without recognizing it in himself. Soon-yi carries the tension between abandonment of her son and responsibility to the world. Jae-won’s father Han-su carries a child’s drawing in his pocket for three decades.

The novel straddles the territory between Nobel winner Han Kang’s attention to the body as a site of historical memory and Michael Ondaatje’s rendering of people shaped by rupture, set among the politics of disappearance in an exotic, unknown territory. Amid a plethora of rare birds and even rarer plants in a rugged and hostile volcanic climate, a husband and wife strive to preserve the culture they have discovered, a feat that eventually requires their abandoned son to achieve.