From noir to suburban mom detective tales, I read a lot of crime fiction. But rarely does it have a sliver of the personality of the book I read last week: A Murder Most Camp.

It’s as frothy as a beach read but funnier than a rom-com — plus there’s a mystery to keep the pages turning.

The setup: Mikey Hartford IV, a spoiled 29-year-old heir to a superstore fortune, gets exiled to run a struggling Adirondack summer camp — and stumbles into a real murder he feels he has no choice but to solve.

“The protagonist had to be gay and snarky, and it was my editor’s idea for the book to be set at a Lake George summer camp,” says the author, Nicolas DiDomizio. “I really love the northern end of the lake — [my fiance] Greg and I have been going up there since 2014. We would rent a beautiful Airbnb, and it was always the best week ever. And then we would do a night or two in Saratoga — until we moved here during the pandemic.”

He’s hard at work on his next novel — while also holding down a high-level, remote marketing job at Apple — that is also an Upstate murder mystery and will be released next year.

“It's about a couple who moves Upstate from the city, which is obviously directly inspired by real events,” he says. “They move into a house that has a bit of a murder problem. It's a fictional Upstate town — but is very Saratoga coded.”