Dear Diary, Reading this book was like trying to quit cigarettes without nicotine patches: irritating and nearly impossible. As if!!!

🥴🥴 it actually was a bit painful for me to write that just now 👆 but if you’ve read this book and are in the same camp as me (ha ha, get it. camp 😐) of disliking it, you’ll hopefully get a chuckle out of it. If you haven’t read the book and you found my opener cringeworthy, you probably shouldn’t read it. It’s an incessant barrage of ridiculous similes and pop culture references.

🎩 <— this is my hater hat, and it is on for this. Buckle up for an uncharacteristically feisty review! I’m feeling more dijon than honey today! 😈

Before anyone can accuse me of Not Getting It, let me say I love satire, I love campy shit, and “the gayer the better” is something I live by. The concept for A Murder Most Camp sounds like a great time, but the experience of reading it was borderline insufferable. This would’ve probably been decently enjoyable as a streaming platform original movie, or maybe just written entirely differently.

It’s difficult enough to conjure sympathy for a nepo baby in 2026, but Mikey (yes, our protagonist is named Mikey, which I hated in and of itself) doesn’t make it any easier. Sure, he does undergo some character development and awakens to some of the realities of what the world is actually like outside of his wealthy elitist bubble, but that was not enough to redeem him for me. He was unceasingly annoying and came across as a Mean Gay that even as a queer person I would find intolerable were we to meet.

Let’s talk about the writing itself for a second. I maintain that a poorly written first person novel is more palatable than a poorly written third person novel. It’s just a bit easier to mask writing weaknesses in first person. (This is not an insult to first person narration whatsoever. Please don’t take it as such.) But of course, this is a third person POV. The tone is glaringly juvenile throughout, and never in the right ways, often unintentionally evoking middle grade. Instead of feeling silly complimentary, this was silly derogatory. The author didn’t just sprinkle in pop culture references, he dumped out the whole damn jar — and while he was at it he appears to have thrown in as many outlandish similes as he could think of. The handful of times I chuckled or found myself entertained weren’t enough to compensate for the rest of it.

As for the actual murder thing mentioned in the title, it doesn’t actually get going until about 1/3 of the way into the book. And once it gets going, it doesn’t even really gain momentum. I am a lifelong lover of mysteries and this one failed to captivate me. Maybe if the author had spent less time talking about Clueless, Titanic and Taylor Swift (all of which I love, for the record) and more time developing atmosphere, characters, and clues, I would’ve been more interested.

Y’all know me by now — I am Team DNF. Life is short, and TBRs are long. I very rarely will push through a book I’m not enjoying or finding interesting in some way, even for a cute lil PB badge. But I had decided I wanted the sparkly Queer All Year badge, so I pushed through. And that’s the only reason I finished this, truly. It started out okay but quickly careened into being a nuisance. There are readers who enjoyed this book and I’m so happy for them; this book has an audience it will appeal to but it ain’t me.

🧅🧅🧅🧅 (iykyk, definitely would’ve made this one of the emojis on here if it had been available lol)