Thank you to NetGalley and Avril Grady for an eARC of this book!

I have no idea what I just read, but I loved it!

Following the misadventures of Jamie, a once-Florida-stripper twink, now a Los Angeles has been, working for his (twice) ex-husband at his porn studio as a scriptwriter. This was an amazing amalgamation of noir, dark comedy, coming-of-age, and romper fiction. I’m so glad that Jamie will return in a sequel, and can’t wait for it to come out!

The Birkenstocks, the Body, and the Bad Diamonds
Avril Grady’s “Sicko” proves that a novel can be filthy, funny, and unexpectedly piercing about the difference between wanting love and understanding it.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 30th, 2026

Some novels announce seriousness by lowering their voices. “Sicko” arrives in Birkenstocks, trailing glitter, criminal evidence, and the smell of bad judgment. It gives us porn scripts, strip-mall murder, diamond rings too vulgar to count as taste, ex-husbands reused like bad habits, and a narrator who treats catastrophe less as interruption than as his native weather. Avril Grady’s trick is not that she eventually rises above that setup. It is that she never pretends tackiness is beneath her. The jokes stay dirty. The rooms stay cheap. The appetites stay unruly. Yet under all that sweat, glitter, and destructive ease, “Sicko” is carrying something nastier than its premise first lets on. The murder matters chiefly because it drags old emotional wreckage into public view.

Jamie Katz changes the air pressure of the page. Forty-two, vain, broke, oversexed, funny, and chronically unequipped for self-knowledge, he is a Florida catastrophe gone a little frayed in California, where he writes porn scripts for Scorch Studios, the San Fernando operation run by Paul, his twice ex-husband and current lover. Paul is now married to Suzanna “Tater” Clotwell, an Alabama beauty queen turned tiny office autocrat whom Jamie dislikes with near-religious consistency. Before the plot even starts, the whole arrangement is already sagging under its own rotten arrangements. Then Paul fires him. Jamie retaliates spectacularly. Soon after, Paul is found shot to death behind the studio. Jamie, with his motive, history, temper, semen, and generally arrestable aura, becomes the most convenient suspect on the board.

Grady drives the thriller machinery hard without letting the people vanish inside it. The book tears ahead with the bright recklessness of someone enjoying the skid. Co-workers glare. Detectives circle. Old entanglements reassert themselves. Stolen jewelry mutates from grotesque gift to criminal evidence. Men with guns drift in from Florida. Porn actresses become amateur sleuths. It is all exhilarating, right up to the point that exhilaration turns poisonous. The corpse, finally, is only the cheapest thing the plot can explain. The uglier problem is older, relational, and much less cinematic. It has to do with how Jamie detects devotion, enjoys devotion, lives off devotion, and still refuses to ask what it commits him to in return.

That is the sore place the novel keeps finding. Jamie does not merely make bad choices. Fiction is full of bad choices. His special talent is uglier. He can smell attachment, enjoy it, manipulate it, and still refuse to read it. He treats love as something atmospheric – something to breathe, joke through, and keep on hand – rather than something that makes a claim. That matters in his marriage to Paul, of course. It matters even more in his long, half-denied attachment to Joe Russo, the Miami mechanic whose care he experiences as endless availability instead of obligation. The plot tightens around murder, theft, pursuit, and blackmail, but the real pressure comes from something more humiliating: Jamie is forever discovering, much too late, that people meant more than he let them mean while they were still there to be read correctly.

The prose knows this before he does. It is filthy, quick, and sharply observant. Jamie does not merely notice rooms. He notices the wrong necklace, the stale upholstery, the class cosplay of office décor, the moral category of a snack table, the social embarrassment of a family crest nobody should own. Grady lets objects enter as jokes and turn into evidence that will not sit still. The rings do this. So do the nipple-ring box, the flowers, the flamingo shorts, the shattered office glass. Even the throwaway surfaces come back carrying blame. Jamie’s voice is crucial here. He is funny in the particular way some people are funny when they can feel recognition approaching and would prefer to trip it before it arrives. The joke gets there first. The feeling has to come through anyway.

That tonal control is the book’s first real triumph. “Sicko” can move from obscene banter to genuine grief without asking permission from the reader or apologizing for the stain it leaves on either mood. Grady understands that shame and wit often share a bloodstream. She also understands that comic velocity can be a form of denial without ceasing to be comic. The result is a novel that is often very funny and occasionally brutal in the same paragraph. Jamie can describe a sex act, a décor choice, and his own emotional cowardice in the same breath, and the sentence does not break. It merely changes temperature.

Very few books can keep this much grief and indecency in the same sentence without blinking. “Sicko” can. Grady never asks Jamie to become respectable in order to become serious. He does not emerge from violence newly solemn, newly acceptable, newly fit for approval. He keeps wanting the wrong people. He keeps performing. He keeps narrating around his own life as if fluency were a substitute for understanding. Grady is too smart to confuse growth with cleanup. He learns. He does not clean up. That distinction gives the novel both its bite and its decency.

The structure is more cunning than the book’s lewd exterior first suggests. “Sicko” can be described as a comic thriller with flashbacks, but on the page it keeps reclassifying what we thought we already understood. The rings start as obscene relics of Paul’s appetite and taste, then turn into evidence, then into burden, then into marriage itself reduced to contraband. Jamie’s porn-writing job, briefly made to look like a sham, turns out to be humiliatingly real. Joe stops reading as backstory and starts reading as the whole buried book. The murder plot earns its keep because it keeps forcing earlier scenes to declare what genre they were in all along. Scenes do not change. Their category does.

This matters because Grady is writing not just a mystery but a novel of belated interpretation. The plot keeps solving one kind of problem while exposing another. Who killed Paul is not, finally, the hardest question in the book. The harder question is how Jamie has managed to live inside other people’s love for so long without admitting that it exists as something other than atmosphere, flattery, habit, or erotic convenience. He is not stupid. He is interpretively lazy where love is concerned, and that laziness has a body count.

Grady is especially good at the ugly overlap where grief, vanity, resentment, and desire all keep talking at once. Paul is a thief, adulterer, liar, sentimentalist, object of lust, and genuine loss. The novel refuses to sort those facts into neat piles. At his funeral, California friends praise his integrity, his taste, his strength of character, and the scene lands because Grady understands that memorial language often lies badly, publicly, and with perfect sincerity. Here it lies about character. It does not lie about attachment. The public Paul is ridiculous. He is also plainly loved. The book does not flatten that contradiction into irony. It lets him remain morally vulgar and emotionally devastating.

That doubleness may be the book’s most underappreciated strength. Paul never becomes merely the dead man at the center of the case. He remains an active pressure inside the novel’s emotional life. Even after his death, he keeps rearranging the living. He links Jamie to Suzanna. He drags Florida into California. He leaves behind sex, money, resentment, logistics, and grief in one tangled heap. He is the mess that keeps generating fresh forms.

Suzanna is the novel’s sharpest surprise. She could easily have remained a foil – polished wife, rival claimant, decorative obstacle. Instead she becomes impossible to do without. Each chapter that gives her more room makes the book less glib and more true. By the end, she is not simply the woman Paul chose after Jamie. She is the other person left holding the same tainted inheritance: his criminal spillover, his sentimentality, his divided loyalties, his bad judgment, his absence. The lunches, the co-management of Scorch, the nights under the same roof, the gradual shift from mutual loathing to mutual recognition – this is some of the best material in the novel. Grady does not give them absolution. She gives them shared legibility. Each comes to see how much of the mess was structural, how much was chosen, and how much pain the other was already carrying.

Still, the deepest cut belongs to Joe. The sharpest revelation is not that he loved Jamie. That would flatter Jamie too much. It is that Jamie had no real interest in learning what Joe’s care might require of him in return. Joe’s protectiveness, practicality, jealousy, wounded patience, and half-articulated seriousness were all there in plain sight. Jamie preferred not to know what they added up to. “Sicko” is at its best when it lets this arrive sideways – through old dialogue, mistimed memory, embarrassment, and the awful comedy of realizing that the emotional center of your life was happening in a room you kept insisting was temporary. The murder is spectacular. The older damage is quieter, and worse.

If the novel has a major artistic risk, it lies there. Grady is asking readers to invest fully in a protagonist who is not simply messy or excessive but often evasive in ways that shade into cruelty. She trusts that voice, momentum, and belated emotional exposure will keep the reader with him. For me, that gamble mostly pays off. Jamie is exhausting, but exhaustingly alive. The book does not ask us to mistake charisma for innocence. It asks whether charisma can coexist with moral laziness, and whether someone can begin to change without becoming purified into a better genre.

At its busiest, though, the novel starts mistaking extra commotion for extra force. The Chatsworth climax is exciting, nasty, funny, and memorable, but it piles incident high enough that its shape briefly loosens: lamps, bullets, Tasers, schoolgirl uniforms, bad rescue timing, thrown objects, collapsing iron décor, improvised brawling. It holds because the emotional stakes are real, not because every beat is equally necessary. A few figures outside the Jamie-Paul-Suzanna-Joe axis also register more as vectors than as dense presences. Edgar is effective, funny, dangerous, and erotically charged, but he is more useful to the book than he is fully inhabited by it. Other supporting players succeed more as tonal instruments than as finished human complications. None of this sinks the novel. It does, however, keep it a little short of the complete formal command it sometimes flashes.

The book feels of the moment chiefly because it never performs topicality. Its queer life is messy without apology. Its grief comes mixed with resentment, logistics, bodily inconvenience, stale desire, and bad jokes, which is to say it looks a lot like grief. More pointedly, the novel understands an adult habit of evasion: the ability to narrate around one’s own wreckage so fluently that narration starts to impersonate knowledge. Jamie is not cruel because he feels too little. He is cruel because he keeps feeling without asking what those feelings cost other people.

I land at 87/100 – 4 stars. The novel is too alive, too funny, and too psychologically exact in its best stretches to score lower, and just unruly enough to stop short of something higher. What it gives you instead of polish is charge.

What lingers after “Sicko” is not mainly the body count, the porn-world farce, or even the criminal jewelry, enjoyable as all that is. It is the slower humiliation underneath them: the realization that Jamie’s worst losses were never fully accidental and never fully understood while they were still in motion. By the time he turns back toward Miami, toward Joe, toward the place where he once mistook improvisation for freedom, the novel has already made its real trade. The glass at Scorch can be repaired. Paul can be reduced to ash and blown into the Pacific wind. The legal story can close. What remains unresolved is not the crime but the simpler, harder question the novel has been steering toward all along: whether Jamie can ever speak plainly to the people he has used, and whether plain speech, arriving this late, can still count as a form of love.

Sicko, at its core, is essentially a book about the dangers of fearing twink death. There is a lesson to be held here in Jamie Katz — a 42 year old twink supreme who just kind of fucks everybody and gets real Florida about it all.

And it was fun! Sicko is an extremely fun read, compulsively easy to get through, leaving you wondering what in the hell did I just finish? After completion, I don’t have much thoughts to share outside of: what was that, why are ovipositors mentioned so many times, and fucking SNIFFIES?

As a young gay person, this book has taught me to not fear twink death. Instead, I will embrace it when my time comes, and I will become the anti-Jamie Katz. Thank you.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

I've been sitting here wracking my brain over how to rate/review this one since I finished it. This was a book that I picked up because the cover looked wild, the description sounded unhinged, and the whole concept was so perplexingly intriguing I couldn't resist. I've settled on 4.5 stars (naturally rounded up to 5) out of a total of 5 stars.

Right off the bat, Sicko presents itself exactly as it means to go on. For me, I had a strong sense that this was going to be one hell of a ride after reading just the first page, and boy did it not disappoint. The early chapters have a tendency to lean into absurd comedy, with a penchant for catty quips and diversions into Jamie's storied history as an ex-Florida Man. So I was truly shocked that by the midway point, this story had hooked me and I found myself emotionally invested. The gradual development of our protagonist is so beautifully thoughtful and meticulous that by the time we get to the big moments of emotional catharsis in the second half, they feel spectacularly satisfying and well-earned. And it's all written with such a light touch that I didn't realize I had been so thoroughly hooked until I was getting teary over a man who's been arrested for wrestling alligators without a permit more than once.

Perhaps the biggest strength of this work is the interpersonal relationships. I never could have predicted how emotionally invested I would be in the growing solidarity and friendship between Jamie and Suzanna at the start of the novel. But there is something so powerful in the platonic bond they develop, in learning to trust someone you've always found yourself pitted against, and finding the person who understands your grief is the very person who stood between you and someone you loved. On top of that, Jamie's bonds with his friends and coworkers, his family back in Florida, and his string of ill-fated relationships make this such a rich tapestry of human connections that the world feels incredibly fleshed out and real.

Something else, and I almost can't believe I'm saying this about such a silly book, Sicko has a very cohesive story structure and pacing. On the surface, it feels like it would be incapable of taking itself seriously, but before you know it you've been swept up in this absurd adventure and the emotional gut punches sure hit hard. Beneath the veneer of (admittedly very funny) comedy, the novel itself is well plotted and every reveal about Jamie's past is a morsel you can't help but savor. Lately I have read many books that took themselves much more seriously than this but struggled with plot progression, so this was an unexpected but very welcome surprise.

To get a little bit more into some vague spoilers (I'll keep it to some vague plot notes and one quote without context, but skip this paragraph if you like) I was truly so taken with the ending of this novel. There is a flashback in one of the final chapters, at such a pivotal moment in the story, where we learn exactly what happened the last time Jamie saw Joe in Florida. Absolutely devastating moment for us to glean this information. Avril Grady does a brilliant job sign posting exactly what is going through the mind of the non-POV characters and Jamie has simply no clue. Gorgeous use of a flashback and limited omniscient POV, even if it has victimized me personally. I feel like a lot of authors think more is more and try to provide too much information to the reader, but it creates much more dramatic tension to withhold information and a clever writer knows how effective it is to just hint at their characters' state of mind. Sicko, of course, falls into the latter category. And I can't forget to mention this but the phrase, "Wouldn't it be so much easier to be a project instead of a person?" has been rattling around my head since I read it. Astounding bit of prose. Did I expect a sincere meditation on relationships and self worth in this crazy book? Certainly not, but it was so evocative and earned in that moment that it took my breath away.

In terms of things I disliked, there really is not a long list. (Disclaimer: these are all minor quibbles and did not seriously impede my enjoyment) I thought that the first few chapters skewed just a smidge too catty for me in a couple of specific moments. In the big climactic sequence near the end, I got the sense that Jamie was the only one doing anything and it felt like the other characters should have been doing something more to help. I also kind of disliked the ending tagline about the sequel, it felt a bit too Marvel Cinematic Universe, like "Captain America will return in Avengers: New Movie Spend More Money." It's entirely possible that the sequel tagline was intended to evoke this comparison, but I thought the ending was so strong and poignant that I would have liked to sit with it for longer, instead of the immediate sequel bait jump scare.

For one final random observation, I feel like this novel would make an absolutely hilarious film or tv adaptation. The dialogue is so snappy and the comedy is expertly executed, I can see how it would play out on screen and it would be amazing. Someone get on this, please!

I honestly really recommend this book, it's a wild, unhinged romp but surprisingly full of heart and sincerity at the core of it. An absolute blast to read, give it a shot and you will not regret it.