On the wall above Priya Venkataraman's desk in Norfolk, Virginia, hangs a laminated map of the Elizabeth River with forty-two pushpins in it. Each pin marks a tide gauge, a storm drain outfall or an intersection that floods on a full moon without a drop of rain. She is a coastal hydrologist, and for most of her working life those pins have been data. For the past four years they have also been plot points.
Her debut novel, Low Tide Protocol (Northwater Books), follows Anika Rao, a flood modeler who discovers that her city's evacuation plan was designed to fail. It is a thriller with a storm surge at its center, and Venkataraman built that storm the way she would at work. We spoke by video a week after the book's September 1 release, with a rain gauge visible on her windowsill.
You model floods for a living. When did that turn into a novel?
Around 2021, during a king tide. I was out checking a sensor at six in the morning and watched a woman carry her groceries through ankle-deep water to her car like it was routine. It was routine. I went back to my office and kept thinking, what's the version of this where the water doesn't go back down? And who decides whether she gets told in time?
How closely is the storm in the book based on your professional work?
Very closely. I built a surge scenario with the same kind of model my colleagues and I run every day, with a fictional city laid over realistic terrain and tide data. I ran it forward hour by hour and wrote the book to that clock. If a street floods at a certain time in the novel, it's because the model said so. I wanted readers to feel the water rising one decimal point at a time.
Wasn't that constraining for a thriller?
It was the opposite. Plotting gets easy when the villain is physics. I never had to invent a reason for the tension. I just had to be honest about how long it takes to drain a parking garage.
"Plotting gets easy when the villain is physics."
Anika finds out the evacuation plan was built to fail. Without spoiling anything, how plausible is that?
I want to be careful here. Everyone I've worked with takes public safety seriously. But plans are built on assumptions, and assumptions have owners. Anika finds a place where someone chose a convenient assumption over a true one. That kind of choice doesn't need a conspiracy. It needs a meeting that ran long and a budget that ran short.
Anika is a modeler, like you. How much of her is you?
Her job is mine. Her temper is not. She says the thing in the meeting that I think about saying in the car on the way home. She also runs, which I don't. I gave her that so she could get across town once the roads were gone.
What did you get wrong in early drafts?
Too many numbers. My first draft had a table in chapter four. An actual table. My editor at Northwater, Celia Brandt, wrote one word in the margin, and the word was "No." She was right. The numbers belong to the model. The reader should get the dread.
Did anyone at work read it before publication?
Two colleagues read it for accuracy. One of them caught a mistake in how I'd timed a pump station failure, which was humbling. The other told me she couldn't sleep the night she finished it. I took that as the highest possible review.
Has writing the book changed how you think about your day job?
It made me think more about the person at the end of the forecast. When I publish a model run, it's a map with colors on it. In the novel, every blue pixel is someone's kitchen. I try to hold onto that now when I'm looking at a screen at two in the morning.
What's next?
Another book set near water, in a different city and a different season. Drought this time, which is its own kind of flood story if you think about it long enough. And I'm keeping my job. The best research I could ask for is showing up to work.
Venkataraman has a field day scheduled the week after next, checking gauges along the river before hurricane season winds down. She said she will bring a notebook. She always does. Most of the pins on her wall started as something she wrote down standing in the water.
Low Tide Protocol by Priya Venkataraman (Northwater Books, 368 pages, $29) is out now.
Books editor. Noor runs RedSquibble's reviews and interviews and chairs the process that produces the annual Debut Shortlist.
