Beth Saulnier

I loved this book from the beginning. I hated the ending. Too improbable. Too rabbit out of the hat mystery wrap-up in the last 20 pages. But I liked the beginning so much, I am going to read the next one in the series. Wish me luck.

This is the first book that I picked up by Beth Saulnier.
I was supposed to go to Bonnaroo in 2003 but decided to go to Grad School instead. I was so bummed out about missing the show that I went to the library and typed "Music Festival" into the bib search catalog. (I'm such a nerd.) Lo and behold, this book popped up. I think only three books had "Music Festival" as a subject heading. I took it off the shelf and that was that. I assigned this book to my genre fiction class to read, and for show more the most part, they enjoyed it. I thought it would be a welcome change from all of the literary fiction we'd been reading.

Alex Bernier is such an awesome character. She's the kind of character that, if she truly existed, I would want to hang out with. She's witty and funny and gets into stupid situations and can hold her own with a bunch of machismo guys and she can drink them under the table. She lives in a small college town (a thinly veiled Ithaca) that reminds me of my good old days at Cornell (the other one). She writes for the paper and is kind of a parasite - but she gets all wound up in crazy murder mysteries that usually involve the deaths of her friends and acquaintances. And she usually saves the day.

In Ecstasy, Alex is duped into covering the Melting Rock Music Festival. It seemed pretty similar to Bonnaroo - music, bad food, camping out, lots of folks being crazy and lots of free lovin'. Although this sounds great to me, it's Alex's worst nightmare. She meets a group of some high school seniors, does a story on them, and then they start dying off after taking some bad acid in the night.

Alex bumps heads with the town cops (one of whom she's dating), the College Faculty, the Professors' Wives (a particularly nasty group of women, I should say) environmental terrorists, the local branch of the mafia, the New York Times, and fluffy newagers that read the wind and magically predict the future. It's just a great book. The story might not completely hold water, but if you are able to suspend reality and just enjoy a book, this is a great light summer read. It is the fifth of the five Alex Bernier mysteries. I've read them in exact opposite order, and I don't think it made that much of a difference. If I could do it again, though, I'd start at the beginning. show less

The Mortician's Daughter introduces Ginny Lavoie, the epoynmous heroine who is also a disgraced
New York city cop. Ginny returns to her small Massachusetts home town following the death of her best friend’s son. Daniel, the best friend’s 19-year old son, was brutally beaten and Sonya, Daniel’s mother, cannot imagine why anyone would have done something so horrible to her son. The local cops have accepted the confession of a local homeless vet and have closed the case. Sonya doesn’t show more believe this is the case and she asks Ginny to investigate. Ginny hasn’t been home in 10 years, since the death of her mother. Her return home finds her encountering long-lost friends, including Jimmy Griffin, her high school sweetheart. Jimmy now runs the family business, a wonderful bakery called “Molly’s”. The mystery plot is very compelling, and the characters are very well drawn.

Bloom does a great job creating the atmosphere of this once-booming mill town and its working class inhabitants, as in this description of the local churches: “Some towns had one Catholic church; Ginny’s had four. They all had proper saints’ names, but they were known by the ethnicity of the immigrants that founded them: Italian, Irish, English, French. But Danny’s funeral was held in the next town over, because that’s where the Polish church was.” show less

I was flipping through a truck of books at the public library when a familiar face popped out at me: That of Beth Saulnier, who wrote the Alex Bernier mysteries (Ecstasy, Distemper, and the other three that I didn't review here). Ecstacy was my favorite, and it happened to be her technically best and the last one she wrote. I mourned the loss of a favorite author. Her website didn't offer any hope of any more Alex Bernier adventures.

So when I saw her picture on the back of this book, I show more immediately flipped it over to see the name: Elizabeth Bloom. Then I flipped it back: Beth Saulnier. Elizabeth Bloom. Beth Saulnier.

Two seconds later I realized that she must be publishing under a pen name! Glory be! More Beth Saulnier! (It turns out that Elizabeth Bloom is her new married name.) I plucked the book off the truck and checked it out, posthaste.

Unfortunately, I wound up disappointed. Beth Saulnier Elizabeth Bloom abandoned the character of Alex Bernier in lieu of Isabelle Leonard. Alex Bernier was a whip-smart, snarky, clever reporter living in the strange Upstate New York town of Benson (a thinly veiled Ithaca). She's got cool friends, has a neat job, and gets herself wound up in all sorts of mysteries involving the local students, professors, professors' wives (a nasty bunch), the local hippies, high school kids, researchers - all well-crafted, well-developed characters. I loved her. She was so cool. I would have loved to be her drinking buddy.

Isabelle, however, is kind of a hapless ditched bride who finds herself alone in New York City. She flits from chapter to chapter aimlessly and listlessly. She has shallow friendships with characters that I didn't really care that much about. Even the backdrop of New York City was flat and boring in comparison to her rich description of upstate New York.

The mystery itself was on the one hand predictable - with so few characters (and so few left alive), it wasn't hard to figure out who was behind the shenanigans. Things that dawned on Isabelle would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain. 9 people die at this one company in a 2 month span of time. Mysterious, no? Yet only Isabelle, who has been there for two months, realizes that something odd is going on. On the other hand, it was the sort of mystery that one couldn't figure out until the end. The clues weren't there for the reader. Now, I like to be "told" a mystery, but there are people out there who like to try and figure it out before the end of the book. I was able to figure out the "who", no problem. But the "why" wasn't apparent until the end.

Oh, what a sad disappointment! I wish that Elizabeth/Beth would go back to Alex Bernier. I just don't mesh with Isabelle. She's much more chick-lit thank Alex; the story was boring; the characters were wooden; and I didn't really find myself caring whether or not Isabelle figured out who was killing employees or if she wound up electrocuted in her bathtub. show less