Ecstasy

Rating:
Summary: Ecstasy says it all!
Review: Beth Saulnier's Alex Bernier deserves the award for best character in a mystery series. She is irreverent, funny, courageous, intelligent and utterly compelling. In this, her fifth appearance, Alex, a features writer for the Gabriel Monitor, is exiled to the neighboring town of Jaspersberg to cover the annual Melting Rock Music Festival. With four nights of loud music, annoying young kids and living in a tent to look forward to it doesn't seem like things can get any worse until the kids start dying from tainted LSD.

The deaths signal the end of Melting Rock but not of Alex's investigation. It's soon evident that the deaths were not accidental. Then Alex notices that many of the people involved with Melted Rock and the drug scene are also part of a bizarre protest at the new Deep Lake Cooling Facility at Benson U. Is there a connection? Why were the boys killed?

The aspect of this series that I enjoy most is the engaging dialogue between Alex and Cody, her significant other, and among Alex and her fellow reporters on the Monitor staff, Madison, O'Shaunessey, Ochoa, and ex Monitorite Gordon Band. This reparte is so realistic and well constructed that I feel as if I've participated in the discussion and often find myself offering suggestions about how to proceed with the investigation. Of course, I'm never as clever as Alex and her cohorts but I have the pleasure of going along for the circuitous journey toward a final revelation.

If you have yet to read an Alex Bernier mystery start with 'Reliable Sources' and read them all in order. If you're already a fan I know you'll enjoy this latest entry.

Rating:
Summary: Intertwining Plots R Us
Review: First of all, let's get this out of the way: I think it says a lot about Beth Saulnier's clarity of writing that she did a better job of explaining Lake Source Cooling in a single paragraph than Cornell did in a dozen press releases.

Okay. Now, the book.

One of Saulnier's greatest talents is that of combining seemingly unrelated plots in a way that doesn't seem unlikely. There's a great old poem, "What It's Like to Live in Ithaca," that does a great job of illustrating how interdependent people can become in the town on which Saulnier's Gabriel is based.

If you've ever lived there you'll understand; if it's not outlandish for the pedestrian in your path as you career down Buffalo Street in a brakeless VW Bug to be your ex-wife, it's certainly not that far-fetched that people involved in a university's controversial, multi-million dollar Lake Source Cooling project would cross paths with the people running a hippie music festival, and a group of teenagers who attend the festival every year, in such a way that none of their lives will ever be the same.

As usual, Saulnier manages to have her alter ego Alex Bernier move seamlessly among the various antagonists, learning just enough to confuse her (and us). And as usual, you might think you see the next step coming, but you probably don't. Yet when it all comes together, it makes such perfect sense.

The characters are almost all three-dimensional, and only someone who has a truly thorough insight into human nature could draw so many different viewpoints so well. Every character, somewhere along the line, will surprise you. I'm still not a fan of mass-market mysteries. But Beth Saulnier writes really good books.

Rating:
Summary: awful and repetitive
Review: I read the first two books in this series and enjoyed the first one. I picked this one up at a book exchange in the library. It's time for this author to start a new series or write a novel comensurate to her growth as a person. Is she serious? Life is short.

Rating:
Summary: engaging amateur sleuth
Review: Over her reporter's objections, the Gabriel Monitor editor assigns Alex Bernier to cover the annual upstate New York's Melting Rock Music Festival. Alex finds all the comfort that would make a teenager feel happy being amidst the racket that the youth calls music. However, she is not a teen so living on undercooked overpriced hot dogs and sleeping outdoors for the four day extravaganza seems rough on the stomach and back respectively.

Alex interviews stoned attendees who've been to this event for the past few years. However, the mellow atmosphere of the drugged crowd turns ugly when three male teens suddenly die. Alex feels elated as she is now in her element. She investigates the homicides over the objections of her Gabriel police department officer boyfriend Brian Cody.

The Boomers will enjoy the vivid description of the mini-city of mud, drugs, free love, rip-offs, and good feelings of Woodstock; selective memory enables ignoring the real ugly rapes and other bad doings that went on back then. Fans of investigative tales will find the murders and subsequent inquiries take a back seat to the festival. The hazed teens are a delight to observe until the murders begin. However, Alex should not have inhaled, as that can be the only reason for her to disregard Cody and place herself in danger trying to solve the case.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Murder at a Music Festival
Review: The prospect of spending four days camping out with thousands of drug-addled teenagers is not appealing to Alex Bernier, so when her editor assigns her to cover the Melting Rock Music Festival she is not exactly happy. But Alex knows how to do her job and she begins nosing around, looking for a story.

That's when she runs into the Jasperburg Eight, a group of teenagers who've been attending the festival all their lives. Against her will she finds herself liking this motley group of kids, so she is shocked when one of them turns up dead.

Then another one dies. Then another one. It seems as though they are dying of LSD overdoses, but then the coroner comes up with some news that is even more disturbing. Someone has doctored the LSD to intentionally make it lethal and that means these kids have been murdered.

Now Alex sets out to find who the culprit is. Along the way she runs up against a host of obstacles: townspeople who don't want to do anything to stop the flood of money the festival brings in, hippies who don't want to talk, a New York Times reporter who is determined to scoop Alex and a killer who may have Alex in his sights.

Ecstasy is author Beth Saulnier's fourth book featuring Alex Bernier as the main character, and it's easy to see why. Alex is smart and funny, devoted to her handsome police officer boyfriend, torn between being a good person and a good journalist. She's the sort of person who will find a dead body and then debate with herself over whether she should report it to the police or keep the information to herself so she can scoop the competition. (She comes up with a compromise in which everyone wins.)

Rating:
Summary: Another great mystery from Beth Saulnier!
Review: This is Beth Saulnier's 5th installment in the Alex Bernier mystery series and yet another gem. Read the book and discover the twenty-something reporter/sleuth that is Alex living her life and getting herself into all sorts of predicaments - thanks to reporting and eventually self-investigating mysterious deaths at a music festival.

Beth Saulnier again makes the most of referencing all sorts of Central New York area locales - something I really enjoy about her books, being a Central New Yorker myself. This novel is never boring and will keep you turning the pages to find out what can possibly happen next.

I can't wait for the next installment! I thank a local book club for introducing me to Beth Saulnier!

Rating:
Summary: Beth Saulnier deserves more fame!
Review: This is the fifth Alex Bernier book, and I would not have seen it if I did not consistently search online for new books by Beth Saulner. Alex, a reporter for the Gabriel (aka Ithaca NY) Monitor, and her friends are totally entertaining, adn have more depth than a lot of contemporary PIs. The stories usually revolve around the nature of Gabriel as a college town and the plots are never simple-minded. In short, if you have not discovered these books, you are really missing something great.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable mystery, well developed characters
Review: While covering an annual rock music festival for the local paper, reporter Alex Bernier interviews eight high school students who had been attending the festival together for years. Alex finds the personalities and dynamics of the group interesting and decides to write a series of stories about the teens. The day the first story appears in the paper, one of the teen-aged boys dies of what appears to be an accidental drug overdose. Two more of the boys in the group die from what appears to be the same drug, and it is evident that there is more happening than a drug overdose.

Running parallel to the drug overdose story line is the opening of a new, environmentally friendly cooling system at the local college. Initially implemented with few protests, a tampering incident turns the water red, forcing the school to turn off the system. Assigned to investigate this story, Alex soon discovers that some of the drug-dealing suspects from the rock festival as well as some local businesses are somehow involved with the water cooling system.

Alex continues her relationship with the teens from the festival to attempt to discover where or from whom they got the highly potent LSD, and to try finding the motive for boy's deaths. Alex's search for the truth becomes personal when her refusal to drop the story threatens her reputation, job, relationship with a police officer and potentially her freedom.

Saulnier offers well-developed characters in Ecstasy, realistically portraying diverse personalities-teens, Alex, police officers, and the local community. Mystery aficionados will guess the culprit about two-thirds into the book, although the motive is not apparent until later. The ending scene is pat and unrealistic, but it should not deter any reader from what is overall an enjoyable mystery.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable mystery, well developed characters
Review: While covering an annual rock music festival for the local paper, reporter Alex Bernier interviews eight high school students who had been attending the festival together for years. Alex finds the personalities and dynamics of the group interesting and decides to write a series of stories about the teens. The day the first story appears in the paper, one of the teen-aged boys dies of what appears to be an accidental drug overdose. Two more of the boys in the group die from what appears to be the same drug, and it is evident that there is more happening than a drug overdose.

Running parallel to the drug overdose story line is the opening of a new, environmentally friendly cooling system at the local college. Initially implemented with few protests, a tampering incident turns the water red, forcing the school to turn off the system. Assigned to investigate this story, Alex soon discovers that some of the drug-dealing suspects from the rock festival as well as some local businesses are somehow involved with the water cooling system.

Alex continues her relationship with the teens from the festival to attempt to discover where or from whom they got the highly potent LSD, and to try finding the motive for boy's deaths. Alex's search for the truth becomes personal when her refusal to drop the story threatens her reputation, job, relationship with a police officer and potentially her freedom.

Saulnier offers well-developed characters in Ecstasy, realistically portraying diverse personalities-teens, Alex, police officers, and the local community. Mystery aficionados will guess the culprit about two-thirds into the book, although the motive is not apparent until later. The ending scene is pat and unrealistic, but it should not deter any reader from what is overall an enjoyable mystery.