Brains & Brawn

BEYOND 'ECSTASY'

"MDMA temporarily lowers interpersonal boundaries," said the Harvard doctor. "Hex dissolves them." "The potential for abuse, for mind control, is terrifying," said the Berkeley psychopharmacology professor. Outside, packs of painfully thin kids in hex-sign T-shirts--the "hexies"--quiver and murmur and make their telepathic suicide pacts. Someone is trying to destroy a generation.

Sarah "Sunny" Randall wants to know who. The investigative reporter on the story for New York's Metro Magazine, 5'3", Radcliffe-educated Sunny is clueless in the deadly world of dealers and underground labs. But Sunny has a secret weapon: Sasha. Her "boyfriend"--a streetwise, 6'3", 250-pound Soviet prison camp survivor and ex-boxer who is friendly with the Greenwich Village Don. Sasha can help Sunny root out the evil mind at the source of hex. But when her ambition and her passion to save the kids get her in too deep, can he save her life?