"You found my philandering ex-husband?" Bitty asked. "Where? Mexico? Paris? In Tupelo with a cocktail waitress?" "In your closet," I answered. "Dead." Break out the hoop skirts and the zinfandel. The Divas are on the case. Wine. Chocolate. Transvestite strippers. Just another good-time get-together for the Dixie Divas of historic Holly Springs, Mississippi, where moonlight and magnolias mingle with delicious smalltown scandal. But Eureka "Trinket" Truevine, the newest Diva, gets more than she bargained for when she finds her best Diva girlfriend Bitty Hollandale's ex-husband in Bitty's hall closet. He's dead. Very dead. Now Trinket and the Divas have to help Bitty finger the murderer and clear her name. Virginia Brown is the nationally acclaimed, award-winning author of fifty novels.

I'm always happy to find a book that includes humor no matter what genre it may be. That's what attracted me to this one. It did get off to a bit of a slow start for me and I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps I was just anxious to get into the story. Once I met more of the characters the pace picked up.

Trinket has come home after a recent divorce and anticipates a quiet life helping her parents in their family home. But when her friend Bitty is accused of murder, plans change. A group of Bitty's friends who call themselves the Dixie Divas take Trinket into their circle and make it their mission to help find the real killer. Fortunately for me, this isn't an easy task but it is funny. The ladies know how to mix southern charm with kick-butt attitude and of course it leads to trouble. I enjoyed them more than the actual murder mystery.

This was a light read and nice stress reliever during a hectic week. I look forward to the next book in the Dixie Divas Mystery Series.

Thank you to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for a review copy of this book. ( )

I was quite excited to get this book from the Early Reviewers group. Unfortunately, the format -- a bound manuscript just does not work with my reading style these days. It is much too big and cumbersome to handle or carry with me and too big for my reading light so it took 3 weeks to read the first three chapters and that was as far as I could get.

In the first three chapters I was not terribly captured or I would have found a way to make the format work.

I was so excited when I got this ER book. Then I was heart broken when I received the book and it was the wrong one! I finally got the book, and unfortunately it didn't live up to the hype I built for it. The first part of the book kept giving meaningless details and descriptions. It felt that everything had to be explained and detailed, though they didn't necessarily further the plot nor where they just nicely phrased.

The plot was cute, though. This book is kind of like a chick lit mystery. I ended up liking the characters (or at least I didn't dislike them) and it was interesting to see what was going on with whodunit. It was a light read and once the plot revealed the problem, the book really picked up for me. I believe this is going to be a series and I am interested to see if I like the next in the series better since hopefully she'll jump right into the story and not give unnecessary descriptions. However, this did not turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful series for me and while I'd recommend it for a library check-out or a cheap $5 or less book bin, I don't know if I could recommend someone pay more than mass-market paperback prices on it. ( )

I don't think I've given Virginia Brown's Dixie Divas enough of a fair shake to write a full review, but I'll say this: at about twenty pages in, I've struggled mightily to become invested in the characters and story. Like others have mentioned, I have Southern roots, too -- and the dialogue does seem, at many times, over-the-top and trite. Still, I'm not abandoning the novel -- I can see the possibility of it all working out for me as a reader, if only in the very distant distance!

Although I myself am a true Southerner, and although I thought this story was pretty good, I did think the Southern-ness of the book was a little exaggerated at times, and I agree with others when I found the book a little hard to get into. However, it was a pretty entertaining read, and I would recommend it to someone enjoying a light, fun story. ( )