Pennies placed over the eyes of the dead are a signature no one wants to see twice. In Yasmin Angoe’s The Ferryman’s Daughter, the ritual points to a serial killer known as the Ferryman, whose crimes have been buried for nearly two decades. For his daughter, Sanaa Karrem, the discovery of bodies bearing his signature threatens to unravel the quiet life she has painstakingly built. Her father may be gone, but the question of what he left behind is only beginning to haunt her.

Sanaa has changed her name and kept her past hidden, building a career as a forensic science teacher after her father disappeared eighteen years earlier. When the murders begin again, she recognises the pattern. The investigation is led by her fiancé, Detective Marcus Morelli, leaving Sanaa caught between her knowledge of the killer and the secret she cannot bring herself to share with the man closest to her. As threatening messages and disturbing gifts arrive, she must draw on her own expertise to work out who is responsible before the body count rises further.

Angoe’s thriller is as interested in the psychology of inheritance as it is in the mechanics of a murder investigation. Sanaa’s fear is not simply that her father’s crimes will be exposed, but that his legacy might have shaped her in ways she cannot fully understand. The possibility that a parent’s violence could become part of a child’s identity gives the investigation a personal urgency. Sanaa must determine not only who is killing but also whether escaping her father’s past has meant escaping its influence.

The medical examiner and coroner community offers Angoe a fresh setting for this exploration. In an interview with The Nerd Daily, the author explained that she researched serial killers, visited a coroner’s office, and consulted friends in law enforcement to ground the novel’s investigative details. She was particularly interested in the question of what it might mean to discover that one’s parent was a serial killer. That curiosity drives the novel’s tension between the evidence of a crime and the private history that gives it meaning.

A first-generation Ghanaian American, Angoe is the bestselling author of the Nena Knight thriller trilogy, as well as Not What She Seems and Behind These Four Walls. Her fiction frequently centres fierce, complicated women confronting dangerous adversaries and difficult truths. The Ferryman’s Daughter begins her new Bloodlines series, placing Sanaa at the centre of a mystery that reaches beyond the identity of a killer to the unsettling question of what a family passes down.

Here’s the synopsis:

Forensic science teacher Sanaa Karrem has spent years trying to leave her past behind. Eighteen years after her serial-killer father, known as the Ferryman, disappeared, she has built a new identity and a quiet life. But when bodies begin appearing with pennies placed over their eyes, she recognises her father’s signature. As threatening messages arrive and the murders continue, Sanaa uses her forensic expertise to pursue the killer while hiding the truth from her fiancé, Detective Marcus Morelli, who is leading the investigation. What she uncovers brings her dangerously close to her father’s legacy and forces her to question how much of his darkness she may still carry.

 

Buy The Ferryman’s Daughter here.