Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

SING HER DOWN

Ivy Pochoda

Cormac McCarthy meets Killing Eve in this gritty, razor-sharp thriller following two indelible women on a path to certain destruction

Florence "Florida" Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women's prisonor so her ex-cellmate Diosmary Sandoval keeps insinuating. Dios knows the truth about Florida's crimes, understands what Florence hides even from herself: that she was never a victim of circumstance, an unlucky bystander misled by a bad man. Dios knows that darkness lives in women too, despite the world's refusal to see it. And she is determined to open Florida's eyes and unleash her true self. When an unexpected reprieve gives both women their freedom, Dios's fixation on Florida turns into a dangerous obsession, and a deadly cat-and-mouse chase ensues from Arizona to the desolate streets of Los Angeles. With blistering, incisive prose, the award-winning author Ivy Pochoda delivers a fast-paced L.A. crime novel for the ages. Gripping and immersive, Sing Her Down is a spellbinding thriller that, at its core, shows just what an angry woman is capable of. Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and These Women. She won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, Ivy taught creative writing at Studio 526 in Los Angeles's Skid Row. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.

Available products
Book Published 2023-05-01 by MCD/FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Comments

Gripping, relentless . . . Sing Her Down is brutal and chaotic and entertaining, but somewhere down deep there's a tiny beating heart with a few wise things to say about guilt and growth.

One of the best crime novels in recent years . . . Sing Her Down is a real accomplishment, a novel that interrogates the violence inherent in both the American carceral system and society as a whole.

Sing Her Down is that rare novel that explodes your expectations from the very first page and goes on doing so until the end. Ivy Pochoda finds these characters at the root of their pain and desire. The prose is flayed and taut, the iconic episodes just keep stacking up, and the entirety has the epic intensity of a murder ballad.

Ivy Pochoda's new novel, Sing Her Down, [is] a meditation on violence and women that is noir of the blackest variety.

Ivy Pochoda once again writes with empathy about a world of unseen, unheard womenthis time, two former cellmates whose lives remain entangled after their sudden release from prison. Sing Her Down is a stunning thriller, at once beautiful and gritty. Pochoda is a major talent.

[Pochoda's] capture of the complexities, diversities and insanities of today's life and culture is next to none. I loved Sing Her Down. The world will too.

Urgent, haunting and fearless.Sing Her Down is her most ambitious and accomplished novel yet.

Electric.

Sing Her Down, Pochoda's tour de force, looks at the rage women may carry, why a person would abandon a comfortable, middle-class living for crime and violence . . . Her staccato writing further elevates the novel and is reminiscent of James Ellroy's style, only more refined [with a] powerful finale.

In muscular prose, Pochoda plumbs the psychological depths of her fascinating characters and extracts high drama from their shifting allegiances. This searing, accomplished page-turner deserves a wide audience.

A gritty thriller with a fiery heart, Sing Her Down is a pulse-pounding western with a devastating message about the oft-forgotten explosions made by women the world tries hard not to see.

Ivy Pochoda is one of the great writers of today, crime or otherwise, although luckily for me, she writes pure noir . . . I will be spending my holidays reading this amazing new novel so that I can recommend it to you all in far more detail come the new year. You're welcome, my darlings (although reading this book is truly the opposite of sacrifice).

Harrowing . . . Ms. Pochoda fuses elements of several subgenrespsychological thriller, procedural novel, hard-boiled crime saga, even magical-realism fableto craft an imaginative chronicle of an apocalyptic season. Like the damaged souls that populate its pages, the book defies pigeonholing. Sing Her Down is unforgettable.

Brave and brilliant writing . . . Sing Her Down ends with the description of a mural that seems to memorialize the final interaction of [the main characters]. People swear they see the mural move, that the mural is alive. So is this challenging, singular novel.

Globe/France Suhrkamp/Germany Siruela/Spain

A Barnes & Noble Mystery & Thriller Pick | An Elle Best Book of the Summer | An Apple Best Book of May | A Most Anticipated Book from BookPage, SPY, Lit Hub, and Paste Magazine

A thoroughly entertaining, mean-as-a-snake modern Western, Sing Her Down hits like a shotgun blast.

We're obsessed with Ivy Pochoda, whose previous books Wonder Valley and Visitation Street crackled with menace and energy . . . Pochoda's writing is both poetic and violent, just like the story itself, and her searing, detailed descriptions make post apocalyptic L.A. feel like a character of its own. We loved this dark, page-turning read.

Pochoda has delivered another brutal blow in her latest, an existential western that starts with a jailbreak and rip-roars its way through a threatening landscape . . . Pochoda demonstrates keen insight into the minds and hearts of desperate people . . . she never misses a shot.

A haunting noir thriller stretching from Arizona up to the California coast, Sing Her Down follows prison cellmates Florida and Dios, and the dark truths Dios hopes to draw from her new friend. When both women are released, Dios chases Florida to Los Angeles in this hot, propulsive new book from the author of These Women.

Beautiful, affecting, and completely impossible to put down . . . Ivy Pochoda can continue to write just about anything, and I'll continue to wait eagerly to read whatever she gives us next.

Since 2013's Visitation Street, Pochoda's gotten better with every book. I don't know what she's got up her sleeve for the next one, but it's going to be tough to top this full-blooded western noir about two women who break out of prison during the pandemic and the detective on their tail. This thing goes big and loud and makes no apologies.

Visceral descriptions of everything from the proliferation of homeless encampments to the simmering emotions of her characters distinguish Pochoda's latest, intense novel.

Pochoda writes with insight and empathy about women pushing back on the violence perpetrated against them . . . she continues to grow in her power to engage readers far beyond the overused tropes of the crime genre, rising to the heights of other writers [like Cormac McCarthy] whose work does not shy away from evil or bloodshed.

Ivy Pochoda's new thriller sounds like a Western version of Killing Eve, which is something we never knew we needed but now need desperately.

Sing Her Down is an incantation, a hallucination, a fiery odyssey of women taking back the power stolen and leached from body and mind, while their souls got harder and harderlike diamonds. Ivy Pochoda's women inhabit a world everyone should walk into with them, a universe everyone should know.