Ecstasy

February 17, 2003
In Saulnier's fifth highly entertaining, if not terribly nuanced, mystery to feature Gabriel, N.Y., reporter Alex Bernier (last seen in 2002's Bad Seed), Alex gets saddled with covering Melting Rock Music Festival, a four-day annual event held in nearby Jaspersburg. For some, the assignment might be an opportunity to dance to the beat and bond with the earth. For Alex, the festival is about Porta-Johns, greasy food and sleeping—or trying to sleep—in a tent. Alex meets six high-school kids who have been coming to the festival for years. Good story, Alex thinks, and sends a dispatch to the office. The story really begins, however, when one of the kids, and then another, dies of a drug overdose. Alex enlists the aid of her policeman boyfriend to determine if the overdoses were truly accidental. Of course, they were not. Likely murderers range from middle-aged flower children to purple-haired girls to unsavory drug dealers, and Alex does a respectable job wading through them all. Meanwhile, she's also following a story involving Benson College, the occasionally overbearing local institute of higher learning, which has developed a cooling system using water from an unusually deep lake. First fake blood and then a real dead body show up in the system's tanks. The music festival and especially the cooling project provide fascinating settings for murders. Regional author tour. Agent, James Vines.

March 1, 2003
In her fifth adventure, Gabriel, NY, newspaper reporter Alex Bernier (Bad Seed) winds up covering a local long-running music festival by default. She spends part of her time interviewing a group of high school kids who attend the event every year. Unfortunately, three of them die after ingesting tainted LSD. Officials end the festival, but media attention remains focused on the deaths, which are subsequently determined to be murders. Already on the inside track, as it were, Alex continues her investigative reporting, bringing danger upon herself. Super plotting, believable characterization, and seamless prose recommend this series title to most mystery collections.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2003
Fans of this excellent series will be pleased to see that snarky reporter-sleuth Alex Bernier is still in top form in the latest installment--even if she does feel way too old, at 27, to be sleeping in a tent while covering a Woodstock-like music festival near her hometown in upstate New York. She interviews a group of teenage festival fans and is as shocked as they are when the boys in the group start dying after ingesting tainted LSD--deliberately tainted, as it turns out. Many, including a rival reporter, begin searching behind the mellow facade of the festival for the source of the drugs and the motive for the crime, but Alex prevails through her unorthodox methods and her insight into the teenagers, who seem to know more than they're letting on. Alex's relationships with her wisecracking coworkers and her police-detective boyfriend, as well as the spot-on portrayal of the goings-on in a liberal college town, round out this well-plotted, entertaining read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)