What I’ve always known about Diane. She doesn’t take sides, unless Ginger is involved; she loves sleeping in tents but not outside of them. Hills, whether hiked or biked, need to be conquered quickly. She can make a meal out of mushrooms en brochette but will pass on dessert if it doesn’t include chocolate. Her favorite classical song is Honegger’s Une Cantate de Noel, and her favorite movie is To Kill a Mockingbird with Sundays and Cybele a very close second. Her favorite book, also, To Kill a Mockingbird.

That’s why, when I needed a followup to my latest hunt-down-the-psychopathic-serial-killer, crime thriller, I pulled her thirty-five year old copy of TKAM from our bookshelf.

Scout’s description of her hometown:

“There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The truth Is Not in the Delalfields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson’s shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it’s nothing unusual ñ her mother did the same.”

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