The Lagoon Keeps Its Own

Amerley Lartey left Ghana as a child and never looked back. In London she became someone new, sharp and solitary, a forensic accountant who finds the debts the powerful would rather keep buried. Then a call at three in the morning sends her home to bury a grandmother she barely knew.

In the seaside quarter of Lanté, the dead cannot cross the lagoon, and the lagoon will not release them. For the water is a goddess, dying now beneath the city's filth, and she is owed what the women of one family have been running from for a hundred years: a daughter to keep her company in the dark. Amerley's grandmother was the last to serve her. Her mother fled. And the goddess, patient as any debt, has been waiting for the one who ran.

As a ruthless developer moves to fill the lagoon and a hidden ledger gives up a century of secrets, Amerley must do the one thing no woman of her line has ever dared. Not run. Not pay. But read the whole account, to its very bottom, and learn what a dying goddess owes in return.

Told in the tradition of West African water myth, The Lagoon Keeps Its Own is a debut novel about inheritance, debt, and the daughters a place decides it owns.