Yasmin Angoe Brings Fresh Voice to Crime Fiction

Former English teacher and recipient of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Emerging Writers of Color, Yasmin Angoe, talks to us about the final book in her Nena Knight trilogy, It Ends with Knight. For those new to the series, Angoe explains, “The Nena Knight trilogy follows Nena Knight. She is an elite Ghanaian assassin for a powerful secret organization called the African Tribal Council or the Tribe… she is the head of their dispatch team and so this group is a group of very powerful and wealthy people who live, who are from various countries in Africa, who have aligned themselves to pull their resources and put back their resources and their prestige and all of that back into the African diaspora and rebuild all of the things throughout the centuries that remind and [were] taken from the African people… so that’s what Nena’s group does, the dispatch team, they literally go and dispatch people who have been like, they shouldn’t be here because they’re not for the cause or they’re bad… Nena is the head of them and she is also the youngest daughter of the Knight family and the Knight family is the head of the Tribe.” While Nena may appear cold and ruthless, she does have a moral conscience and readers will feel they can root for her despite the callousness of her job. According to Angoe, “She’s conditioned herself, ‘This is just a job and so I’m going to do this job and if I’m going to do this job, I’m going to do it well.’ So her thing is more, ‘I’m going to be the best at the job that I have’ and she’s able to compartmentalize and she’s also able to have empathy and she knows right from wrong… I really wanted to have a compelling character who was in a position that makes the reader question, ‘I don’t know if I should,’… but through her journey, through her character, and how she interacts and how she meets new people that bring out different aspects of her, I was hoping to be able to get the reader on her side…”

Regarding her writing process, Angoe prefers to focus on character development first rather than the plot itself. “I’m one who thinks for a long time. I like to marinate on my story and hash out all of my issues before I sit down and write it… I have to really know what is motivating my characters and how they’re going to be, how they’re going to behave, prior to sitting down and actually writing it…” She advises, “Know your characters. Your characters drive your story.”