The Tiara Club by Beverly Brandt (St. Martin's Griffin, $12.95)
"Georgia and Callie were the founding members of the Tiara Club, a group they'd laughingly formed one night after a few too many martinis. Their membership, they decided, giggling over the memory of putting glue on their behinds to keep their swimsuits from creeping and taping their breasts together to create the illusion of cleavage, would consist of recovering beauty queens who had survived the pageant circuit. Deborah Lee Tallman, Kelly Bremer, and Emma Rose Conover (who was also Georgia's cousin) had dabbled in the beauty pageant ring but hadn't gone all the way to the Miss Mississippi competition like Callie and Georgia had done in their prime. Sierra Riley was a pageant virgin and a relative newcomer to the South who taught first grade at the school where Callie's twin boys were currently enrolled. Callie had figured any woman who could cheerfully handle thirty hyperactive six-year-olds every day ought to qualify for Tiara Club membership, whether or not she'd ever set foot on a runway.
The main goal of the group, as far as anyone could tell, was to drink their way alphabetically through the sixth edition of The Bartender's Black Book. After two-plus years of meetings, they were only just getting started on the B's, with tonight's featured drink being the banana cream pie martini.…" --excerpted from the book
