Reading Group Guide Press Release Free Chapter Diamond Dogs: A Novel by Alan Watt lso Available as an eBook I was playing chicken with the headlights. I'd turn them off and see how long I could drive in total darkness. It was as if I was floating, totally free, like nothing could hurt me, like I didn't exist. With the noise and the darkness and the cool air on my face I knew that I could do anything. As long as I didn't have to think about where I was going, as long as I didn't have to think about my father. --Diamond Dogs With the emotional resonance of This Boy's Life and the narrative power of White Oleander, Alan Watt's debut novel, Diamond Dogs, is an utterly original father-and-son drama about a crime and its cover-up.

Seventeen-year-old Neil Garvin lives in a small town outside Las Vegas. Abandoned by his mother when he was three, he blames his abusive father -- the local sheriff -- for driving her away. Neil is good-looking, popular, the quarterback of the high school football team -- and as cruel to his peers as his father is to him. Obsessed with Neil Diamond, Neil's father is a charmer in the eyes of strangers, but a monster to those closest to him. Neil plans to get out of town on his "million dollar arm," until the night when he accidentally commits a terrible crime, which his father, unasked, covers up for him. Over the course of the three days that follow, Neil returns to school and attempts to go through the motions of his everyday life. But when the FBI arrives and begins to close in, Neil and his father become locked in a confrontation that will break them apart -- and set them free.