Tiara Trouble

By Lane Buckman

An excellent first in a series and I will look for more of Destinee Faith Miller.

~Rantin’ Ravin’ and Reading

This was really a super fun read and hopefully a start to a long and hilarious series.

~A Chick Who Reads

Tiara Trouble was a very cute mystery set inside the fascinating world of pageants.

~Books-n-Kisses

Destinee won my heart. She’s a southern gal, with all of the grit, humor, and sass that goes with it.

~fuonlyknew

Tiara Trouble:
A Destinee Faith Miller Mystery
New Series
Publisher: Cozy Cat Press (August 27, 2013)
Paperback: 230 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1939816160
E-Book File Size: 609 KB
ASIN: B00EWSB3GG

Synopsis
What happens when Dynasty meets Honey BooBoo, they have a baby, and that baby is raised by Charlie’s Angels? You get TIARA TROUBLE, a bedazzled cozy mystery full of gritty glitz.

One foreign policy question five years ago sent Destinee Faith Miller’s dreams of being Miss American Universe up in flames and landed her back in her hometown of Phenix City, Alabama, with her tail between her legs. But like the mythological bird that her hometown is misspelled after, she rose from the ashes to create Destinee’s Dolls, a thriving pageant consulting business knee-deep in pink, prints and tulle.

A death at the local level of a national event lands her the job of pageant emcee, and Destinee dares to dream of bigger things—maybe even a reality TV show! But when judges start dropping like flies, she has her hands full keeping herself alive long enough to see those dreams come true. Contending with catfights, car bombs, and the camouflage-colored funeral of a redneck’s dream, Destinee gets a little help from her friends, family, and a pit bull named Clarabelle.

About This Author
Lane Buckman is a former beauty queen from Phenix City, Alabama. Growing up, she wanted to be Miss America, a criminal lawyer, a super model, the President, a Bond girl, a brain surgeon, a journalist, a back-up singer for Duran Duran, and a college professor of Medieval Literature. In order to fulfill those dreams, she became a writer. She lives in Texas with her family, and enjoys every miserably hot second of it.
Her solo debut novel, TIARA TROUBLE, is available from Cozy Cat Press on October 28, 2013, with a sneak peek launch the week prior at the BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL. TIARA TROUBLE, a light-hearted cozy mystery, marks a departure from Lane’s earlier works in the darker horror/fantasy genre.

The well-received THE ORDER OF THE BLOOD (Black Bed Sheets Books, April 09, 2011), co-authored with Nicole Vlachos, was Lane’s first novel. She has ghost written and consulted on two others.
Follow Lane on Facebook and Twitter, and keep up with her world on her blog.

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/lanebuckmanauthor

Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/lanelese

Website:  http://www.lanebuckman.com

Purchase Links:
AMAZON              B & N

Beauty and the Dumb

Lane Buckman (guest post by the author)

Back in June,  NeNe Leakes—one of the judges of the 2013 Miss USA pageant—asked Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, about a recent report showing that in 40 percent of families with children, women are the primary earners.  She wondered what it says about society that women continue to earn less than men. Powell responded with the baffling, “I think we can relate this back to education and how we are continuing to try to strive to … figure out how to create jobs right now and that is the biggest problem. Especially the men are um, seen as the leaders of this and so we need to figure out how to create education better so that we can solve this problem.”

I was watching the show when that happened, and my jaw dropped.  My stomach sank, my shoulders crunched up, and I cringed just like I do when an Olympic gymnast falls from an apparatus.  I was devastated for Powell, but also a little giddy because I was then shopping Tiara Trouble, and what could have been better for Destinee Faith Miller, than a real life compatriot in pageant brain freeze?

Destinee’s story, outside of having to save her own skin when someone starts killing off judges of the pageant she is Emceeing, deals with having made a spectacular flub on the national pageant circuit.  She’s a beauty queen who has walked away with just about every title she’s ever wanted, but right when the big one is within her grasp, she blows all her chances with one terrible answer to a complicated interview question.  When her flub goes viral, she heads home to ridicule, and works to rebuild her life.

Something I wanted to explore with Destinee is how you fight the internet.  Destinee’s victories didn’t go viral, but her mistake did.  Her name doesn’t carry the cache of her many successes.  Her name is synonymous with dumb.  Dumb beauty queen.  Dumb blonde.  Dumb girl.  How do you beat that rap?

I can’t spoil the story and tell you if she manages to overcome the likes of YouTube and CNN.com, but I can tell you how thankful I am that my spectacular flub came prior to the advent of the internet.

I didn’t make my gaffe at a beauty pageant, but I did make a fool of myself talking about beauty.  In high school, I was invited to participate in a televised forum on the topic of beauty and image.  It was doomed from the start.

A couple of months prior, I had snuck a bottle of hair color home from the drugstore and rinsed my blonde hair shoe-polish black.  My horrified mother, hoping to teach me a lesson, refused to let me find a professional to fix the mess I’d made of myself.  The color wore out gradually, and was a nice mossy green when I got the call for the TV show.

Thinking I might trick people out of looking at my hair if I dressed like a professor of English Literature, I wore my owl shaped eyeglasses, a turtleneck, and one of my father’s old, tweed suitcoats.  In retrospect, I looked like a tiny replica of Paula Poundstone.

At least that was what the cute boy, also on the panel, told me.

We got started, and I could see myself on the monitor and my hysteria began to rise.  I looked terrible.  I was a pale faced, four-eyed nerdling with green hair, wearing a jacket better suited to David Byrne.  Now, remember I’m a pageant girl.  Looking terrible was devastating to me, and it was even worse because I was feeling so ugly and having to talk about beauty, but I had to power through.

I don’t remember what the question was, but it was directed at me and in the same rambling breath I called my best friend fat, unattractive—“My best friend, you know, she isn’t conventionally attractive.  She’s overweight and, well, just isn’t a beauty queen”—compared the American obsession with weight to the Revolutionary War in the most ridiculous of ways—“We were separating ourselves from England, and maybe one way we decided to do that was to get slimmer—be thinner,”—and somehow got around to Marilyn Monroe being too beautiful to live.

Don’t forget to follow the entire tour.

I could hear myself talking, and I knew I was making a bloody mess.  The moderator’s face had sagged under the weight of my great idiocy, and the kid next to me had started snickering.  But I could not stop.  I could not stop to save my life.  When I finally ran out of words, all the moderator could say was, “So…yeah…uh…” before turning to another panelist to bring back some sanity.

You have no idea how many times I have thought about that and thanked my lucky stars that the internet had not been invented when I started down my merry path that day.  I know there are copies of the video out there—my mother has one—but even if it went out over YouTube today, I could at least plead teenager.

Poor Destinee could only plead ignorance, and then work to rebuild her brand from the ground up.

Tiara Trouble: A Destinee Faith Miller Mystery by Lane Buckman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kudos to the author for a well-written cozy mystery that had everything I could want–a strong female protagonist, a baffling triple murder mystery, some hot romance without bedroom detail, and a story that never had a dull moment. I am not a fan of beauty pageants. I was when I was younger, but they have changed so much over the years. I never had genuine dreams about being involved in one, but the author wrote with such passion that I almost wished I had experienced that desire. It made so much sense when I read about the author’s own beauty pageant experience. That explains why it all seemed so realistic.

I will be the first to admit that this one had me stumped almost to the end. I figured it out just before Destinee did, and the author did an incredible job of always keeping you guessing when it came the main question on everyone’s mind–Who Done It? I was so engrossed in the story that I finished this book in record time, and my brain was working overtime to name the killer.

There are a couple of issues. There is some brief profanity, but I didn’t find myself too upset over that. And the bedroom scenes that were alluded to were so nondescript that if I hadn’t been able to read between the lines, I may not have realized that Desinee was having relations with her boyfriend. Again, I wasn’t overly concerned. The story won out over any potential issues.

I highly recommend this to mystery lovers. It is an easy book to read, and I can almost assure you that you will not be sorry.

I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I was not financially compensated.

View all my reviews

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