The main character of Alan Watt's DIAMOND DOGS, Neil Garvin, appears to be an American stereotype --- he's attractive, popular, the star quarterback of his high school football team, and primed like an arrow to be shot right out of his small Nevada home town. It sounds like the set up for that old Tom Cruise movie, All The Right Moves, where he sports his way out of his confining iron smelting town. But this is definitely not that triumphant Hollywood story. Neil is no Cruise-like hero --- he actually has a wretched personality. He takes out his sexual frustration on his girl friend, occasionally bullies his best friend Reed, and has a nasty penchant for picking on nerds. He roughs them up, gives them wedgies, makes their lives miserable ---and ultimately, after a night of heavy drinking, he kills one --- a boy named Ian Curtis.

Suddenly Neil's life is turned inside out. Everything that seemed important a few minutes before --- football, his angry father --- dissolves when he sees the broken boy on the road. Broken by his carelessness, his drunkenness, as if his whole life had been spinning along just to come to this tragic point. So much for the arrow out of town. His world freezes and he drives home with the body in the trunk of his father's car. And so DIAMOND DOGS begins.

Upon returning home Neil endures his father's wrath for driving his car inebriated, and you find out that his abusive dad is also the town sheriff. At that moment he gets a call about a missing boy --- Ian Curtis --- who was last seen walking away from the party Neil just left. The twisted irony starts as Neil drives his father to the dead boy's house, knowing with dread that the body is bouncing around in the trunk. There's no turning back the next day when Neil discovers the body is missing --- and he realizes who disposed of it.

The action of the story only spans a few days, but it feels like so much longer. Although it seems he might actually get away with it at first, Neil begins to unravel, especially after the dead boy's uncle, an FBI agent, comes to town. While Neil's father battles every sheriff's nemesis, the FBI, Neil breaks down internally while retaining a stoic facade. But beneath that veneer he's drowning and knows it. Like a child who has done something wrong and wants forgiveness, Neil wishes for his mother. But she left him and his father when he was a baby and he barely remembers her. All his life he's struggled with her abandonment, trying desperately to find out why she left. In the middle of everything he imagines that she returns, that she rings the front bell and comes back into his life, just when he needs her most. He thinks:

"We'd drive to where I threw the fifty-four yard pass. I'd show her the place where I first kissed Lenore. I'd show her all the places where I had gone and tried to hold onto my innocence. And then I'd show her where I killed Ian Curtis on the road and she'd take me in her arms and tell me that I was forgiven."

If only.

Throughout every scene of this often painful but expertly crafted novel, you can almost hear Neil Diamond singing in the background, amidst all the death, manipulation, and lying. Neil's father is disturbingly obsessed with the singer, and even takes Neil to a concert in the height of the investigation. Preening and primping like a high school kid before a big date, his tough as nails father greases his hair and slides on his snakeskin boots to see his ""King"" --- not Elvis, never Elvis, but Diamond, perform live in Vegas. In a daze, Neil goes with his father and watches the ""Diamond Dogs,"" all the other lonely greased up men, swoon to the croon, during their 90 minutes of serenity, a fragment of freedom in their unhappy lives.

After this last concert, the book races at high speed to its harrowing conclusion. The climax between father and son is shocking. No one is left unscathed. Secrets are unearthed. And the dust on the Nevada desert finally settles.

   --- Reviewed by Dana Schwartz

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