The Wine Club

Most people can’t tell a good wine from a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck.  Best friends Reggie and Audrey come to that conclusion when they decide to start a for-profit wine club late one night--as they’re drinking wine, of course.  They’re really going to need the money.  Their daughters have just been elected to the elite Mohave High Tigerette Pom Squad, captained by the devious Felicity and coached by her former beauty queen mother, Cynthia.

In The Wine Club, three suburban housewives learn how to run a high-stakes con.  From their humble start gluing their fictional Éclatant wine labels over the Two-Buck Chuck labels, they grow bolder and more sophisticated in the fake French wines they offer at their monthly women-only wine club parties, such as “vintages” from Château Pétrus and Château Lafite Rothschild.  With each party, the stakes get higher, the women get greedier, and their mistrust of each other grows.

The women are so busy with their kitchen operation--pouring cheap wine into expensive bottles--that they don’t pay much attention to how the Tigerette Pom Squad, with the skimpy outfits and risque performances, is changing the newest members’ lives.  Husbands, too, have gone AWOL for significant reasons, and while there is more money, it is never enough.  And never mind that what they’re doing is illegal.  Throw in a kidnapping, possible matricide, and an old boyfriend trapped in a Panic Room . . . Well, things get complicated.