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Alex Bernier is a reporter for a small newspaper in an upstate New York university town. She has seen murder, corruption, and other crimes in her years there and mostly she has enjoyed her job. This time, however, may be a bit different. She is assigned to cover the Melting Rock festival (rock music) after a freelancer who had tantalized the publisher with a wonderful proposal backed out. This means she must go to the park area, put up a tent, and live there for five days amidst competing bands, the constant odor of drugs, and lots and lots of people. Making the best of it, she searches for good stories and she hears about eight teenagers (four boys and four girls) who have been coming to the festival every year. She finds these young people and interviews them. While each is a little bizarre (they are teenagers after all) she finds she likes them very much. Therefore when first one and then two more of the boys die of an overdose of drugs, she is saddened although her run-of-the-mill story has just turned much more provocative. When the police say that the overdose was deliberate, Alex has a major story. Alex is working on another story as well, the project at Deep Lake to circulate the very cold water at the bottom of the lake for the university air conditioning. There are, of course, protests about what this will do to the environment and the people in charge seem a bit difficult to pin down. Then something happens which really gets Alex¹s attention. Eventually she herself is in peril, is suspended from the newspaper job, and could well lose her freedom unless she unearths what is happening. This is a very well-told and fascinating story. The attention of the reader is held throughout and we are drawn to the protagonist, Alex. She looks at life with wry and sometimes cynical amusement and we are able, through her eyes, to get an honest and unabashed view of what is happening. She tries very hard to find out why Melting Rock draws so many people, why they come back year after year. The best they can do is say it¹s like a place out of time, a location where limits do not exist, where laws are not enforced. where no one has to worry about all the everyday problems (kind of like we read mysteries). When those who are most enthralled learn that their dream is not true, things become ugly and violent. Saunier does an outstanding job of capturing that idealism and the subsequent disillusion. She is excellent at describing adolescents in all their confusions, their enthusiasms, their loathing of what they feel is jeopardizing their dreams. The plot is superb and I was mystified right to the very end. There were plenty of red herrings for the reader to fasten on and plenty of wrong answers to develop. And yet the denouement was logical and believable and there were plenty of hints had I been paying attention. Alex has a police lover, but they have agreed not to discuss each other¹s cases and they pretty well stick to that. So Saunier avoids many of the clichés about running to the cop to get answers the protagonist cannot find herself. And I was delighted that the characters do not sit around and rehash the story over and over as has happened in several recent books I have read. When that develops I feel like the author is questioning either my ability to remember what happened fifty pages back or her ability to make it memorable. I highly recommend this book and suggest you go back and pick up the earlier books in the series if you have not already done so.
Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, April 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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