Lisa Kirkman Novel

Black Cat Walks in the Moonlight

Upmarket Book Club Fiction 96,000 words Seeking representation

A family, a disappearance, and the quiet work of finding each other

When the Barrett family's black cat disappears into the mountains above Lake Tahoe, only ten-year-old Adam can see what finding her requires. His mother searches in the wrong decade. His father converts the search into a command operation, applying urgency to solve what is unsolvable by urgency. His sister Megan is losing her only friend, which nobody in the house has noticed. In this quiet catastrophe, every character's efforts complicate another's. The cat, and this family, need someone to be willing to be still.

Black Cat Walks in the Moonlight is an upmarket family drama, 96,000 words, ideal for book club readers who enjoyed the tension in Sarah Damoff's The Burning Side, and the thoughtful emotional depth of Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say. The storytelling will feel amiliar to fans who appreciate Maggie O'Farrell's lyrical style.

Black Cat Walks in the Moonlight
The Characters

The Barrett Family

The novel moves between five points of view — four human, one animal. Each thinks they are looking for the cat, but they are all searching for something else entirely.

Adam
Deeply empathic, age 10

The only one who understands that finding the cat requires a different kind of attention. He develops a connection with her that he thinks lets him see through her eyes. When he sets out alone into the threatening Sierra Nevada forest to find her, he is chased by coyotes, badly injured, and lost in snow.

Rebecca
Distracted by her own losses

A freelance architect, Rebecca just wants to get things done. But she can't. The search destabilizes her and triggers buried grief over losing her teenage sister to schizophrenia thirty years earlier, a loss she has never fully articulated.

Read the excerpt of "Rebecca on the Streets"

Bryan
Careful construct crumbles

Bryan constructed a new controlled, orderly adult life to compensate for what his chaotic childhood failed spectacularly to provide. The cat's disappearance cracks open his carefully crafted facade and his escalating tactical responses to the search only succeed in driving the cat and his cherished family further away.

Megan
Mirrors the cat's journey, age 14

Megan is blindsided by the double loss of the cat and losing her best friend. Her story mirrors the cat's loss and disorientation outside. Both isolated, both retreating, both waiting for someone to understand what they need. After the friendship breaks, she finds her way toward a new connection on her own terms.

The Place

Lake Tahoe's Kingsbury Grade

The novel is set on the rugged Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Here is a glimpse of its beauty and danger with clips from the book, or discussion about how I incorporated Tahoe's unique features into the storytelling. Click the images to learn more.

The Inspiration

She was real. Her name was Pigeon.

The book isn't really about the cat, but there was a cat who was the catalyst for the story. My own black cat, Pigeon, walked out the back door one morning in the fall of 2019 and while she stayed close to eat, and we even caught her twice, she got away. She never made it back inside. We searched for weeks as winter closed in, left food, created elaborate and ineffective traps. I even called a biologist who suggested that all cats, even big ones like mountain lions, couldn't resist the glimmer of CDs so we broke up a dozen Madonna and Styx CDs to create a kitty cat disco inside a trap. But she was too wary of any traps by that point. Not knowing, but imagining what she might be dealing with, was the worst.

It surprised me how much the search revealed about everything else in our lives. I was shocked to see how differently my husband I approached the search, how little help we could call on, and how a missing animal made our household turn completely inward, magnifying our unresolved issues.

The novel is not autobiography. But the story started with a real cat, and her absence made something interesting become unbearably visible.

Our black cat

Pigeon — the Inspiration

Pigeon on Video

She stayed close by. We caught her on camera.

These videos were taken during the weeks Pigeon was outside. She returned to the yard regularly to eat but refused every attempt to bring her in. We also saw a bobcat and a bear during the search, a reminder of who else was out there.

Return — hungry
Return — the stairs
The bobcat visitor
That's not our cat
Read More Work

Excerpts & Other Short Stories

An excerpt from Black Cat Walks in the Moonlight has been published in the 2023 ACES Anthology of Northern Nevada writers. Click below to read that, another published short story about a woman recocking with her past decisions, or an excerpt from a short story written for an audience of lawyers, which is currently out for submission.

Lisa Kirkman
About the Author

Lisa Kirkman

Lisa Kirkman is a Lake Tahoe–based writer working at the intersection of literary fiction, family drama, and the quiet weight of unspoken grief. Her work explores what happens inside families when the thing they love most — or fear most — goes missing.

Before fiction, Lisa spent years in media, marketing, radio, and podcasting, which taught her how stories hold audiences, and what makes a voice worth listening to. She is a member of Tahoe Writers Works and has been published in the ACES Anthology (2023 and 2024). She is currently seeking representation for Black Cat Walks in the Moonlight.

A second novel, Candid Candice, set in an ad agency in 1990s Los Angeles, is in development. It's all fun until we realize what we just sold.