A MURDER MOST CAMP, cozy amateur-sleuth mystery with added queerness!

A MURDER MOST CAMP
NICOLAS DiDOMIZIO
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The Guncle meets Every Time I Go On Vacation Someone Dies in this fun, twisty mystery following a spoiled nepo baby forced to work at a struggling summer camp who stumbles into a real-life murder mystery he has no choice but to solve.

Rustic cabins. Lakefront bonfires. A painfully hot lifeguard. And a murder? Summer has never been this camp.

Mikey Hartford IV has coasted through his twenties in a distracted blur of yachts and sex and partying. But when his father discovers his latest million-dollar impulse buy and changes the terms of his trust, the party's finally over. Now, unless Mikey can make a positive contribution to the world before his thirtieth birthday—one that doesn't involve throwing cash at his problems—he'll never see another yacht again. (Or even so much as a canoe.)

Enter: Camp Lore, a struggling summer camp in upstate New York where Mikey has to work as the oldest, least-qualified staffer to prove that he can "do good" alongside his twelve-year-old aunt. (Yes, aunt.) But Mikey isn't sure he'll be able to survive the camp's ramshackle living conditions, let alone the gaggle of preteens who won't leave his side. And when his campers become obsessed with a local legend set at an abandoned cabin on the grounds, Mikey's chances of not making it through the summer become dangerously real—because it turns out there's a murder hidden beneath Camp Lore. And someone there will stop at nothing to keep it that way.

Solving a decade-old cold case will surely be enough "good" for Mikey to earn his inheritance. He just has to stay alive long enough to do it…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a hoot! This is one of those reads you, as a member of a group being threatened with ever-worsening life outcomes by the very government holding power over you, really, really can use right about now. I was completely prepared to roll my eyes and smile. I needed the hit of "it will be okay, smile more" energy I expected from the description.

I got that. I also got a fun mystery to solve. (Which...well...I've been readin' mysteries since 1967, hard to pull the wool over my eyes.) And a grossly overprivileged trust-fund workshy queenie-queen gets thrown into existential panic as my whipped cream topping on the sundae of this story.

I deliberately avoided using the "cherry" metaphor for reasons I hope are obvious.

What happens is kinda not the point of the story, it's what Mikey becomes in dealing...for the first time...with what happens when his woefully unprepared self is the one in charge of handling what happens. A pillow princess by avocation, Mikey is not at all accustomed to using the space in his brain around his movie trivia and his taste for hot gold-diggers for much of anything. It's "cute" in a young guy. (I don't think so, but that's conventional wisdom.) Mikey's dad isn't havin' it as a life for his soon-to-be-thirty son. Mikey gets a job as his aunt's kind-of carer. The twist is his aunt is twelve. (Go Gramps!) And the job's at a summer camp for her.

He, the laziest human imaginable, is about to be responsible for everything a camp counselor does. Without having been to camp.

*gleeful hand rubbing*

It goes like you'd expect: Poorly.Except, of course, not really. Lurching from crisis to problem to rebellion, Mikey finds the way out of leading teens by example is following his own teen passion for filmmaking. Telling people the story of a long-ago counselor who vanished without a trace and is rumored to have been murdered...his aunt's a true-crime nut, no one in the 2020s has not encountered the genre pervading our culture, and really honestly in our heartiest of hearts are any of us utterly immune to the appeal? Real people fall into awful circumstances and never receive justice because there are so many who need it and so few who know how to deliver it.

Opportunity practically uses a tactical battering ram on Mikey's door. He's now leading by example, helping his aunt find purpose, and attracting the kind of man who's more than physiologically a man...a strong, capable, grounded person with a man's anatomy.

So here's my reservation, and the lost fifth star's explanation. Jackson is a hottie with a heart. Sofar so good. He's way out of Mikey's league, but people cross those lines all the time because "the heart wants what it wants or else it doesn't care." (Bless you, Emily Dickinson!) It's the...unearned-ness...of Jackson's love for Mikey, it's the way Mikey really doesn't set out to become Jackson's man but kinda selfishly just accepts it is happening, that sticks in my craw. It's consistent and fully supported in the storyline, it's clearly how Mikey would have to receive the loving attention of a man like Jackson as a gift, but theres something off about that dynamic for me.

But that's what reviews are about, right? I'm here to say "the story worked but..." so you'll have a picture of how you think you'll respond not just what events you can expect to occur. If you want a book report ask a chatbot for one.

Only real people have opinions.

THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence, just what it says on the tin

THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence
DIANA RICKARD
NYU Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How serialized crime shows became an American obsession

TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people―such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In The New True Crime, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder―these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”

With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media―which allows for binge-listening or watching―makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.

The New True Crime questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I chose to read this in spite of my serious problems with making victimhood the center of yet another cultural conversation. The howls of outrage when another Black man is convicted, on the flimsiest of evidence, of raping a white woman, center her whiteness and the racism of the laughingly labeled criminal-justice system.

Many parts of the conversations we should be having are entirely missing, eg, Black women raped by white men get no podcasts, murders of Black men and male adolescents get fewer than the statistically appropriate number of hours devoted to them, and let us not even bring up trans folk and/or sex workers of any skin color or gender...why go on, it is all part of the entertainment industry and its long, deep relationship with Othering.

This is not, however, the story...or even more than a glancing part of the story...that Author Rickard tells in this book. It was not intended to be, so this is not a failing of execution but of design.

There is no point yelling at someone for not doing what *you* want done.

The book, as written, makes a strong case for the net positives of a field of entertainment that focuses cultural attention on the failings of a system designed to operate out of the majority’s sight. The techniques of the entertainment industry...heightened language, elisions of tediously bulky chains of evidence into more narrative-friendly sound bites...mirror the long-standing prosecutorial tricks of evidentiary manipulation that these podcasts and shows highlight, only from the other side.

Since the system we have is an adversarial one, with rules that...while on the surface even-handed...frequently get bent or ignored when convenient for those representing institutional authority, we will always need independent actors with the access and the desire to turn over the rocks plopped on top of the holes in evidence in service of the narrative needed to get a conviction. Everyone is guilty if the right/wrong storyteller gets hold of the narrative. (Side note: NEVER TALK TO COPS WITHOUT A LAWYER. NO ONE IS INNOCENT IF THEY SAY YOU ARE NOT.)

So this new use of the entertainment media does indeed do Society a solid service by shining harsh and unflattering light on the actors for the State. It highlights the miscarriages of fairness and honest dealing that are so very common in US society. These are net positives for all concerned. Right?

Crimes have victims or they are not crimes. Victims, living or dead, have no say in who, or how, or why, their trauma is presented, whether during or after the crime, its investigation, or its rehashing. Very few people are Alice Sebold or E. Jean Carroll, those eloquent enough, well-favored enough, or just willing enough to see processes like those needed to re-investigate their horrific personal and, all too often, intimate violations bandied about in public again and again. I dont know if you are aware of this,but there are truly shitty people out there on the internet who absolutely **love** making their ugliest opinons public. These already-traumatized people are all too often targeted by those rotten-souled jerks.

This book is not intended to solve these issues. That it does not is not a reason not to read it. This new use of entertainment to correct flawed narratives instead of spread copaganda is, in my own view, a net positive for society. It comes with problems and abuse vectors that are, sadly, not new. The possibility is that the new true crime could shine a bright enough light on those cyberissues that they will get onto the radar of the ones who can solve them, too.

Ain’t holdin’ my breath, mind you, but the possibility exists, and that is a good thing. Author Rickard makes the outlines of the emerging true-crime media landscape clear and comprehensible to non-expert readers. Her prose is up to the reportorial task at hand; her eye for the narrative strand is at the least as good as the podcasters and showrunners she reports on.

A read I recommend to any media junkies, all leftists, and the passively consuming podaholics who might read this review.