Saroj Anand

I write thrillers set in the places most Western writers drive past — the Andaman Islands, the back streets of Chennai, the wiring under a rising Asia.

My people are engineers, policemen, con men and ordinary families who find out how the system actually runs, usually a few hours too late. That is the shape most of my books take: someone competent discovers that the thing they trusted is not broken but working exactly as designed, and by then they are already inside it.

I am an engineer by training, which mostly shows up as an inability to leave a number alone. If a story turns on a building, a network or a piece of machinery, I want the tonnage and the throughput to be right even when no reader will ever check. A good deal of that research never reaches the page, which is what the journal is for.

Saroj Anand is a pen name. I am Lakshmi Narasimhan, a programmer with a day job, and my non-fiction lives at lakshminp.com. I hatch the plots and write them in the cracks of the day.