While this is a genre I typically very much enjoy, I could not get a quarter of the way through this one. Language was too flowery, and the plot was unclear from the very beginning. Since I did not complete the book, I will not be posting a review online. Thank you for the opportunity.

I'm afraid this book was somewhat of a disappointment for me. I was expecting a true crime book but instead got a lot of fictionalization by the author combined with a memoir of his young adult life. The crime itself was secondary and not well handled. That being said, the author has writing ability and if the book was presented differently, it could well be an enjoyable read. As it was, I don't feel that the book was consistent with its description and didn't deliver the true crime experience I looked for.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime by Cutter Wood

1.25 stars

Sabine Musil-Buehler owns a nice little hotel in Florida with her estranged husband. Sabine’s car is stolen, but she is nowhere to be found. An investigation turns up with blood on the vehicle and Sabine’s boyfriend is beginning to look like the number one suspect in this odd case. No body, but a car and an apartment covered with odd patches of blood shows that something has gone array. Cutter Wood visited this hotel once and has developed a connection to the case. Love and Death in the Sunshine State focuses on finding out what really happened to Sabine and the connection that Cutter develops with the main suspect. I can’t help but compare most true crime novels to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and it doesn’t help that the publishers are doing this as well. In Cold Blood is effective because it focuses on the town, the family that was murdered, and the killers before, during, and after their crimes. Wood decides to focus on a relationship and himself. The case doesn’t become the centerpiece of this story until about 50% of the way through. It made for a very boring read. I skimmed the majority of this novel because it had no pertinence to the case and I was uninterested in Wood’s own relationships. Capote never made In Cold Blood about himself, but Love and Death in the Sunshine State is all about Cutter Wood with the convenience of a connection an odd murder. Wood’s largest drawback as a writer is overexplaining. The majority of this novel consists of frivolous information that has no importance to the true crime case that is being presented as the centerpiece of this story. I’m looking at all this from the perspective the crime being the driving force of this novel and from that perspective it does a half-baked job of really laying down the facts and delving into the people that have been affected by this crime, but if I look at this novel from another perspective. The perspective that this is a story about a young man struggling with graduate school, a serious relationship, and trying to explain the connection he has to this strange case then this novel is even worse. Wood’s writing style is not strong enough to really hold itself up without the allure of the true crime mystery. I feel like I’m being harsh, but this novel was a pain to get through and because I didn’t like the writing style my enjoyment of this novel really suffered.


Whimsical Writing Scale: 1

The crime itself is fascinating and the last half of the book wasn’t all that bad to get through. In fact, Wood’s writing style became a little bit easier to get through. I won’t go too much into the plot itself because this is a true crime novel and if I tell you all about the crime then I kind of ruin the purpose of you reading this novel. I do think that the case itself is interesting and one that I’m sure many true crime will be interested in analyzing. This isn’t the worst novel I’ve ever read and it definitely has its moments, but I don’t think this was the novel for me.


Plotastic Scale: 1.5

Cover Thoughts: It doesn’t look very sunny, but it does look like In Cold Blood.

Thank you, Netgalley and Algonquin Books, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

This was a bit of a mash-up of the author’s relationship blended with the story, which was really about a woman in Florida’s Anna Maria Island who goes missing. There are three suspects: her husband, her boyfriend, and the man found driving her car. The writing is a bit different. I generally prefer my true crime to be free of any fiction, but I found that in this situation I didn’t mind the author’s take on what may have happened. This is a good read for crime buffs and history fans with the flavors of Florida thrown in. An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley and author Cutter Wood for my honest review.

Algonquin Books
Publication date: April 17, 2018

While staying in a motel on the island of Anna Maria in Florida, graduate writing student Cutter Wood witnesses the search for a missing woman, who happens to be one of the motel's owners, as it begins to ramp up and intensify. Fascinated by the mystery, as I think many would be, he fixates on the woman, a German married to the American co-owner of the property, Sabine Musil-Buehler.

Sabine's husband Tom ran the motel with her and despite their estrangement at the time of her disappearance, they still shared a house and their business, so he was obviously a suspect. The second was her boyfriend, Bill Cumber, who worked at the hotel until he was sent to prison on an arson charge - suspicious considering part of the hotel was later set on fire.

This was a book that didn't know what it wanted to be. Wood admits as much during a meeting with a local journalist who asks him what his angle is in investigating or writing about the case, and he admits he doesn't have one. The angle that seemed to develop, through getting more deeply involved with one of three suspects in Sabine's disappearance and murder, combined with some navel-gazing and entry into what seems to be his first serious relationship, is a lengthy meditation on love and partnership, including where those things can go wrong.

It's also a case of a nonfiction writer inserting themselves into a story to the detriment of that story. Or it's a bait and switch - interested in the true crime story, morbidly drawn to a missing person case, the reader instead gets a graduate student's melodramatic, overly descriptive account of his love life, his rekindling of a friendship and subsequent romance with a childhood friend, and his obsessive research into fires while trying to understand what transpired in that Florida motel.

It's an odd book, to say the least. The author is a talented, polished writer - that's very clear, but the book was a mishmash of topics that didn't belong together, despite his dedicated attempts to tie them all up with some relevant connection. And despite the obvious strength of his writing, it sometimes still reads like unedited creative freeform. He's well read, especially in classics, and that comes across strongly, but the mix of academia and literature reads somewhat elitist. Not to mention that it's missing the crucial element of deeper journalistic investigation that would make a great work of true crime.

A large portion of the second half of the book is his fictionalized account of the relationship between Sabine and Bill Cumber, her boyfriend, one of the three suspects in the crime. I skimmed this section because it wasn't true, there isn't an overwhelming amount of evidence for it, and the author didn't get much access to what evidence there was, it seems. Plus it had imagined dialogue like this, from the working-class Bill to the very put together Sabine: "I never hung out with a woman of quality, you know." This is modern Florida, not an 18th century novel about star-crossed lovers with a class divide. Not to mention the creative license taken in imagining events like this. It doesn't belong in nonfiction. This could've been a fictionalized account of the relationship and crime that captured his imagination, or it could've been a memoir, but both parts mashed together feel weak.

An embellished commentary runs throughout the crime reportage, so I couldn't even say that this portion stands alone as an interesting read. I'm all for the newish genre of true crime that's more literary than sensational and fact-reciting, but it falls short. It was not a lovely surname, he writes of Tom Buehler's name before Sabine adds it on to her own. Sabine is German, and Buehler is a German surname. Why would she be bothered by it? Did she SAY she was bothered by it? What does this add?

It's one of many examples of projecting personal opinions and perceptions onto someone without evidence that they shared them, or were affected by the same things that affect and impress upon him. There is a thread throughout, which I suspect was meant as the overarching concept of the book, of truth and what it means to different people, how it can be perceived unevenly, how sometimes the fiction is more powerful than the truth anyway, etc. But it's hard to feel invested in any message or lesson from this.

All that being said - he does have talent, it comes through strongly in certain parts. Maybe if he could write about a subject that he can actually get enough information on (and that's not entirely his fault - plenty of people in criminal investigations are going to be tight-lipped, in certain cases there's just not going to be enough information available to write a book-length narrative about it, although even here I'm suspicious because detectives gave him plenty of info that wasn't publicly available, thanks to his prison correspondence friendship with Bill) and if he separates what he sees of himself in a story and the truth, whatever that may be, of the story itself.