Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochada (2023)
This book gripped and haunted me from beginning to end.
And I think it's doing it a disservice to conveniently categorize it as some kind of thriller, crime story or even, in a real stretch, a "western".
"Sing Her Down" is most assuredly literary fiction, but written in the immediate, propulsive prose you'd expect in such an action-packed, violent story.......told with brilliant, incisive writing and imaginative, unforgettable imagery.
Yes, in way, it resembles and duplicates the epic, larger-than-life mythic-figure showdowns of Sergio Leone's Italian westerns like "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" and "Once Upon A Time In The West".
The book forces a monumental life evaluation on its three main characters, two women convicts who've violated their parole and the policewoman hunting them - do their darkest impulses come from some pivotal moment in their lives or was the darkness deep within them ingrained, always inside them from birth?
At the height of the 2020 Covid pandemic, Arizona prison cellmates 'Florida' Baum and 'Dios' Sandoval enjoy an early parole, due to the prison's overcrowding. Florida, daughter of a wealthy L.A. family, accumulated a criminal record as a somehow peripheral figure in the crimes she fell into. So Florida's come to think she can find some light at the end of the tunnel, a path to redemption.
But Dios, a hardcore, murderous, unredeemable sociopath, views Florida as a kindred spirit, a sister in darkness who's yet to recognize and embrace the truth of herself. When Florida, hoping to establish a sense of normality, breaks parole and hops a bus back home to L.A., the obsessed, lethal Dios follows her every step of the way. An ultimate showdown between these women becomes inevitable.
And what a perfectly surreal, dystopian backdrop author Ivy Pochada imagines for these women and their final encounter......a mostly abandoned, Pandemic-ridden city whose populace remains fearfully self-quarantined in their homes and whose streets now belong almost exclusively to the homeless.
With murder victims left in their wake, Florida and Dios are being tracked down by Detective Lobos, while she herself must deal with the stalking of her abusive ex-husband. When the paths of these three women finally intersect, it's a climactic confrontation worthy of an Ennio Morricone " Western showdown" symphony.....a hellish dreamscape committed to a wall mural that seems to come alive if given a sideways glance.
"Sing Her Down" struck me as the kind of darkly dreamt book to fully surrender yourself to and lose yourself in........ and even if we're not quite at halfway through 2023, I'd already rate this as one of the best 5 star (*****) books I've come across of this year....a must have addition to your TBR list.
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