Sing Her Down

This is the story of Florida—Florence Baum—and Dios, two women whose time behind bars didn’t end their anger. It sharpened it. Florida wants distance and a car, a way back to the illusion of safety. Dios wants truth—Florida’s truth—and she won’t stop pushing until Florida faces it. Kace, another prisoner, narrates from the edges with a chorus of dead in her head, calling out what everyone else tries to ignore. Detective Lobos, haunted by her own past, follows a trail through an emptied city, a ghost bus, and the sidewalks of Skid Row. As the pandemic turns Los Angeles quiet and harsh, these lives collide: a CO’s throat is slit on a bus, a mother is strangled by a backyard pool, and a showdown rises at Olympic and Western, where an artist paints a scene that seems alive. What matters here isn’t just who did what—it’s why a woman decides to pull the trigger, and what that choice says about who she has already become.

• Listeners who love crime fiction told through fierce, complex women
• Fans of Los Angeles stories that lean into Skid Row, pandemic streets, and moral gray
• Anyone drawn to character-driven, propulsive narratives with a hard emotional core

Ivy Pochoda is the author of These Women, Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and The Art of Disappearing. Her work has won the Strand Critics Award and France’s Prix Page / America and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. For years she taught creative writing at Studio 526 in Los Angeles’s Skid Row. She is a professor in the low-residency MFA program at the Palm Desert Center of the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.