“She was a cat like any other cat,” says Lara Diamond. “Cool. Aloof. A past as mysterious as that faraway look she sometimes got in her eye. I fell hard the first time I saw her on a cold winter night, shivering in the shadows and nursing a nasty gash on her thigh. She keeps her secrets and I keep mine. I call her Alice, but I know she has gone by at least two other names. So what? Lara Diamond is my fourth alias.”
That’s not an actual copy of Diamond’s novel, Man Overboard, by the way: So far, the based-on-a-true-story mystery, set in 1920s Florida, is only available in an electronic format (from Cerridwen Press), so she had to print out the “cover art,” fasten it to another book, and then call Alice to the set with catnip. “It could be worse,” she says. “Alice could be into Southern gothics. Then I’d have to hide the bourbon and jimson weed.”