Contemporary Authors

• Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2018

1. Love and death in the Sunshine State : the story of a crime LCCN 2017045041 Type of material Book Personal name Wood, Cutter, author. Main title Love and death in the Sunshine State : the story of a crime / Cutter Wood. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description pages cm ISBN 9781616207304 (hardcover : alk. paper)

• Workman Publisher - https://www.workman.com/authors/cutter-wood

  Cutter Wood was born in Central Pennsylvania and received his BA from Brown University, where he was awarded prizes for nonfiction and poetry. Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a visiting scholar in creative nonfiction at UI and the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

• author's site - https://www.cutterwood.com/

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  Cutter Wood was born in Central Pennsylvania and received his BA from Brown University, where he was awarded prizes for nonfiction and poetry. Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a Provost Fellow at UI and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. For his forthcoming book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State, he was awarded a 2018 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

• american short fiction - http://americanshortfiction.org/2018/04/24/editorial-outtakes-cutter-wood/

  Cutter Wood completed an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, during which he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a Provost Fellow at UI and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. For his forthcoming book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State, he was awarded a 2018 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/22/the-difficulty-in-writing-about-murder/

  QUOTED: "I don’t know if it’s possible to read or write about the death of another human being without feeling you are somehow bound up in that death. But I think now ... that this feeling of complicity might not be a bad thing at all. When you look across the table and begin to see yourself in the person sitting there, that’s where the story begins."

  The Difficulty in Writing About Murder
  By Cutter Wood April 22, 2018
  First Person

  Anna Maria Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

  My mother-in-law enjoys quilting, prosecco, chocolates, family photographs, geraniums, skim milk, and the new children’s wing at the public library. She is a kind woman, and—as long as you don’t curse—an eminently forgiving person, with a bent toward digital ineptitude that is at once exasperating and endearing.

  “Okay, I clicked on it,” she says to me over the phone. “Now it disappeared.”

  “It shouldn’t disappear,” I say. “Nothing just disappears.”

  “Well, it disappeared.”

  When the whole family goes to the beach, she packs a sun hat and snacks and tells us about her childhood catching crabs at the shore with only a piece of chicken and a string. At some point, as the conversation trails off, she reaches into her beach bag (purple, she sewed it herself) and gets out a book, and for the next hour she doesn’t say a word. Such an innately garrulous woman, what is it that has so engrossed her? Naturally, she is reading about a murder.

  My mother-in-law is quite an aficionado of murders. She’s traveled the winding canals of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti, in the novels of Donna Leon, as he investigated the drowning of an American serviceman; she’s followed along behind Louise Penny’s chief inspector, Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, as he unraveled the mystery of the socialite CC de Poitiers’s fatal electrocution at a curling competition. At night, reclining in her easy chair by the living-room window, she takes out her hearing aid and falls so wholly into these stories—pages snapping crisply one after another, thumbnail chewed to a nubbin—that she forgets about the dog waiting by the door and the kettle whistling on the stove.

  What my mother-in-law does not read, however—and this is a point of pride for her—is true crime. She will read about the decapitation by snowmobile of a fictional errant insurance salesman (through the transmogrification of literature, she becomes the main character, literally stumbling on the head of the late insurer), but if a murder has actually occurred, it somehow precludes her interest. For my mother-in-law, something distinguishes the real murder from the fake, something prevents her from reading the former yet allows her to consume the latter with immense enthusiasm. She loves the characters in murder mysteries, she’s told me, their foibles and their deadpan philosophizing, but when she reads true crime, there’s a sense that the events are being sensationalized for her consumption, and she simply feels uncomfortable. This discomfort has been very much on my mind lately, because over the past few years, as I’ve undergone that slow process of becoming a part of my wife’s family, I’ve also been writing one of those very books, a book about an actual murder.

  I don’t have much natural interest in crime, whether true or invented. My proclivities run more toward the mundane joys of domesticity. I enjoy leafing through cookbooks and pulling the Dutch oven down from the shelf, and I share with my mother-in-law a passionate interest in the garden. In the fall, I look forward to the arrival of the various Dutch bulb catalogues; and in the spring, when she tells me, sighing over the phone, that the deer have again eaten the leaves off all her Armenian hyacinths, I feel her pain, not only because I planted those bulbs for her but because I know how pretty they would have been. I have tried to learn to appreciate true-crime books, but without much success. I was only a paragraph into Capote before I’d had enough, and the hundreds of knockoffs were hardly better. I can’t even watch semiviolent movies. I made it an hour into The Talented Mr. Ripley before I had to stop, twenty minutes into Thelma and Louise—it’s not that they’re gruesome, it’s the stress. When I come across the story of a crime in the paper, I feel less excitement than nausea. I don’t want to know how many times the seventeen-year-old stabbed his grandfather, or that afterward he went to the mall and bought new sneakers.

  And yet, it was from reading the paper that I learned about the disappearance of a woman named Sabine Musil-Buehler, a motel owner in Florida. One night, on a little island off the Gulf Coast, she simply vanished. There was no body, no murder weapon, and though the sheriff’s office named three men as persons of interest in the case, no one had much of a motive. It hadn’t ever been my intention to write a true-crime book, but I’d been staying at the woman’s motel not long before she went missing, and I’d been drawn back to the island by the peculiar hallucinations of her that the people who lived there were having. After the disappearance, they saw her everywhere: at the Circle K and the Salvation Army, at a bar with a man dressed like a pimp. She was at the orthodontist’s office; she was boarding a flight at the Sarasota International Airport; she had crossed over into the beyond and would be in touch soon by communicating telepathically through her pet parrot. I wanted to write something about these people, about the way we fill the space where a woman once lived with all our fears and expectations. It didn’t occur to me that this sort of project, going from person to person, interviewing them about a missing woman, almost exactly mirrored the work the detectives were doing. And neither did it occur to me that, like them, I was beginning to assemble a story of what had happened, or something like it.

  This story wasn’t easy to research in either practical or emotional terms. Some people spoke with me out of concern for their missing friend, others because they liked to gossip and conjecture, others for reasons I could never quite understand. The woman’s husband decided early on that he wouldn’t speak about his wife, while her boyfriend was so communicative that I could hardly reply to one of his letters before another arrived. “Especially me and those closest to her are deeply troubled on her vanishing,” he wrote. “You’re not some kind of investigative reporter are you?” The hardest hours were those spent with Musil-Buehler’s brother, looking at photographs from her childhood, hard not simply because of his grief but because I could feel the way my own work prodded that pain into the open. We sat together at a table, flipping through photographs, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching as he told me what I could see plainly for myself. This was Sabine at a birthday party, Sabine in a hailstorm, Sabine wearing a fur coat. When I asked him to describe not the photographs but his sister, who she was as a person, he seemed to struggle to find the appropriate phrasing. After a long pause, he finally brought up a few words. She was punctual, he said.

  As time went on, it became increasingly clear that Sabine Musil-Buehler had been killed. As I spoke with the detectives and sifted through affidavits and drove out to the Manatee County Jail to conduct an interview, it gradually dawned on me that I was no longer writing a short essay about a disappearance but a book about a murder. The case had begun to consume my thoughts to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. Sabine Musil-Buehler appeared often in my dreams then, her corpse sitting beside me at an extravagant opera; or if I dreamed I was swimming, she took me by the ankle and dragged me down into the depths. In the drawer of my desk, I kept a folder of photographs that the detectives had taken of her apartment in the days after her disappearance—her closet, with its mess of dresses and shoes; a sand dollar atop a dresser; a long red sofa—and I returned to these images every so often, when I felt I’d lost a sense of what I was doing. I didn’t think I’d find the clue that would solve the crime in those photographs. Rather, when I surveyed those scenes of normal domestic life, I was trying to see in them some explanation of why the murder occurred at all.

  As the investigation slowly moved forward, I developed a singular mental tic. From time to time, without ever really meaning to, I would think back to my own life on the night Sabine Musil-Buehler had disappeared. I kept a regular journal at the time, and I knew from my notebooks exactly what I’d been doing that evening. I was over a thousand miles north of the island, in a small city in Iowa, watching television with a few friends. I knew exactly who else was there and what was on TV. I even remembered the kind of beer we’d been drinking. Sometimes I imagined that I could go back in time, fly to Florida, and stop the murder. I saw myself arriving breathlessly at 208B Magnolia Avenue, banging on the door, waiting for it to open. More often, I simply tried to recollect that night in my own life, in all its details. Didn’t we all have too much to drink that night? Didn’t we all go out on the porch later without our coats even though it was November? Wasn’t the sky clear? Wasn’t I happy then?

  Everything I was writing hinged upon that evening, but why was I returning to my own experience of it? The question needled me, and it wasn’t until the case was resolved, it wasn’t until they finally found out exactly what had happened to Sabine that I realized why. I think I returned to that night in my own life with such frequency because in writing about a murder, I felt the same sort of discomfort my mother-in-law feels in reading about one. Although I knew the detectives wouldn’t show up at my door, as they’d shown up at the doors of the missing woman’s husband and boyfriend, I thought back to that night because I was reminding myself, albeit unconsciously, that I had an alibi.

  When the case unexpectedly came to a conclusion, unraveling of its own accord in the span of a single morning, I drove once more out to the Manatee County Jail, a route by then so familiar I hardly even noticed it. I barely noticed the oaks strung with moss, the gypsum stacks covered in yellow wildflowers, the railroad tracks leading off in a straight line toward Tampa. I was sitting in the visitation room, awaiting the arrival of the murderer before I knew how I’d gotten there. As the interview I was about to conduct took shape in mind, and the story I’d undertaken to write lay open before me, I felt a crescendo of discomfort. As Susan Sontag said, we can only draw so close to another’s suffering before we begin to feel responsible for it. You can do a lot of pretty philosophizing with yourself and still find, at the end of the day, that your work relies on the death of another human being.

  If there is a simple answer to where one goes from that realization, how one works those dark and unsettling materials without a sense of complicity, I have not yet found it. I sat there with my notebook, my pen, and watched as the room filled with the other inmates’ visitors: some old, some young, some men but mostly women, a few dressed as if for church, others wearing nothing more than sweatshirts, sweatpants, and flip-flops. I wondered again what exactly I was doing in Florida, why I had continued to pursue this project, and I thought, as I often do when I’m away from home, of my wife, whose loveliness seems to increase in some mystical and disconcerting proportion to each mile that separates us. There were only a few minutes then before the man would arrive and I would have to begin asking him questions. I adjusted my collar and stared down at my notebook, where an ant had appeared and was making its circuitous journey across the page.

  It has taken me years to realize what it means to describe someone you love, someone who has gone missing, someone you may never see again, as punctual. It has taken just as long to understand why a detective would come out of retirement because of a single missing-persons case, or why a man would end the life of a woman. Sometimes in writing and reading, we are offered these sorts of glimpses into the lives of others. We see ourselves reflected in the people on the page, we recognize in them something we’d been unable or unwilling to acknowledge in our own lives, and, if we are lucky, we’re allowed a clearer existence because of their struggles. I don’t know if it’s possible to read or write about the death of another human being without feeling you are somehow bound up in that death. But I think now, as I thought that day at the county jail, that this feeling of complicity might not be a bad thing at all. When you look across the table and begin to see yourself in the person sitting there, that’s where the story begins.

• Salon - https://www.salon.com/2018/04/19/a-murder-mystery-and-an-authors-obsession-in-love-and-death-in-the-sunshine-state/

  QUOTED: "I was interviewing a number of people, in particular interviewing Sabine’s boyfriend, William Cumber, about their relationship. At the same time, I had just moved in with the woman who was then my girlfriend, now my wife. A lot of the same issues that they were having were ones that I thought were reflected in my own life."
  "First of all, just talking with William Cumber made me reflect on these things. Then secondly, I felt like if I was going to subject him to this scrutiny, I had to turn the camera back on myself and subject myself to the same scrutiny. Then you became part of the story because it is such a small community, and you developed this relationship with one of the prime suspects. It's still strange to me to say that I have a relationship with William Cumber, who was one of the suspects."

  Cutter Wood (Erin Shaw/Algonquin Books)
  A murder mystery and an author’s dark obsession in “Love and Death In the Sunshine State”
  How a stay at a Florida motel became a decade long odyssey for Cutter Wood
  Mary Elizabeth Williams
  April 19, 2018 10:00pm (UTC)

  Cutter Wood wasn't a true crime obsessive. He wasn't the sort of man who could rattle off his favorite unsolved murders and disappearances. He was a graduate student studying in Iowa, whose mother just happened to send him a newspaper clipping about a suspicious motel fire on Anna Maria Island, In Florida.

  The blaze — and concurrent investigation of its missing owner, Sabine Musil-Buelher, — intrigued Wood, who had been a guest there a few months before. And that small connection drew Wood into a mystery that would encompass nearly ten years of his life, involve three compelling suspects and form the basis for his haunting debut, "Love and Death In the Sunshine State."

  Salon spoke recently with Wood about the small town crime that fascinated him, about writing what it feels like to die and in finding the humanity even in a person who commits the darkest deed.

  Your mother sent you this newspaper report and you almost immediately got sucked in. Why did this crime resonate with you at that moment in your life that it did?

  In some ways I could never truly understand why I went down [to Florida]. I received that article. It just seemed strange that two weeks after this murder — it was most likely a murder — someone would then still feel so roiled inside that they would feel obligated to go and set fire to the motel. That really, really came into it.

  Then there were all these tips and leads coming into the sheriff's office after the woman went missing. They were just so peculiar. It's this little island, and people were really having these hallucinations. They saw her everywhere. They saw her at the Goodwill and the Salvation Army, they saw her at a bar with a man dressed like a pimp. They saw her looking disheveled and upset. They saw her at the orthodontist's office. They saw her at the Sarasota International Airport boarding a plane. One woman I spoke with was totally confident that Sabine was going to communicate from the afterlife with her through the shape of her pet parrot. Part of my original interest was really just trying to figure out what was going on in this community,that they were filling this place where this woman had been with all of these kind of strange hopes and desires and reactions.

  But you were also going through your own things in your life that that drew you to this. You could have written a book that was just straightforward reportage, but you didn't.

  I was interviewing a number of people, in particular interviewing Sabine’s boyfriend, William Cumber, about their relationship. At the same time, I had just moved in with the woman who was then my girlfriend, now my wife. A lot of the same issues that they were having were ones that I thought were reflected in my own life. First of all, just talking with William Cumber made me reflect on these things. Then secondly, I felt like if I was going to subject him to this scrutiny, I had to turn the camera back on myself and subject myself to the same scrutiny. Then you became part of the story because it is such a small community, and you developed this relationship with one of the prime suspects. It's still strange to me to say that I have a relationship with William Cumber, who was one of the suspects. I've got a big box full of letters here, and there's bound to be something that develops between you. It’s not something I'm totally comfortable with.

  What was it like in your experience living this in real time? You maybe believed certain things about the way that events transpired, and then in the course of events found out, no, actually, things that I heard, things that I believed were entirely different.

  The strangest thing about this entire project was that the day I sent what I thought was the final manuscript to my agent. I sent it maybe at 10:00 in the morning, and at 10:15 I hopped on the computer and there'd been a confession.

  At that point in time, I had become close enough to people down there. I was so emotionally shocked when the confession occurred just because there had been this threat of a trial for a long time, but it seemed like it was never going to happen. There was no body. There was still no murder weapon. There was still really no defined motive. It really seemed like a long shot that there ever be any kind of resolution. I'd kind of written an entire book with that presumption and I was okay with that. I thought that that open-endedness was not a terrible thing. Then to send it out and 15 minutes later find out that everything has been clapped shut. I was really, really struggling.

  I would imagine both professionally and personally.

  I definitely spent years writing something and putting together the sequence of events, and even if they're somewhat or largely confirmed, it was still weird to see it all suddenly play out so quickly.

  I want to ask you about something you did which was very, very bold. You go into the experience of the murder from the point of view of the victim and also from the point of view of the murderer. That's a very unusual device. You get into that experience of what it would feel like to be murdered. I wonder how you did that. There must have been intense.

  It certainly is a part of the book that I almost always planned to take away eventually. You write all these different things and see what happens. You don't really have a concrete idea. It was something that I realized was a big decision and I wasn't at first sure if I was prepared to make that decision.

  I had all of this data on what would have happened, photographs of her apartment and all these very general things. I also had done lots of research about — it's painful to talk about — what are the experiences of dying? What is the physical bodily experience? I wrote a lot of that before the confession happened, before we knew exactly what had happened. In fact, I wrote just tons of different versions. At that point in time I had no idea of exactly how the murder had occurred. It was just too gruesome that I kept dialing it back and dialing it back to the point that I thought it felt palpable to me. Then of course, when the confession occurred, it turned out that the most recent version was in fact the real one. I thought it was important to keep those perspectives in there because for me, a lot of the book is about not giving preference to a single perspective. That's kind of the elemental difficulty of a relationship. I felt like I needed to do that there.

  And then to get into the baffling experience of committing the murder as well, the surprising aspects of what it would feel like to kill somebody.

  I went down and was able to just sit down with the man who confessed the murder and we spent probably close to a week talking. It gave me the full breakdown of everything from the moment he first met Sabine to what it was like to to roll her body up in a sheet and bury her. It was one of the strangest and definitely most difficult things in my life doing that. I can't think of really many times when you are required by this thing you've gotten into to go through that experience, to sit down and have someone tell you what it's like to murder.

  I would imagine that really, really gets in your head.

  I can't say that I understood what he was going through or even exactly why he did it. But I knew there was more to him than simply that he was a murderer.

  It is easy to kind of turn a real experience of violence into entertainment. To forget that the victim had a life, was a fully realized person, and that the murderer was as well. The person who commits a crime is also someone who was somebody’s child, who maybe had hopes and dreams, and who then committed terrible acts.

  I feel like it's dangerous, as a person, that it’s dangerous to society, to ignore that murderers are also often people, and these things don't just come out of nowhere. That was definitely a big thing that was on my conscience and my consciousness while I was working on this. I wanted to make sure that this is a story about human beings.

  Without in any way blaming the victim or making excuses for the murderer, but seeing it as a complicated story that has humanity in it. What's it like now in the aftermath of that? Where are you now within this story that has had a resolution?

  I got into this thing when I was 24 and didn't expect it to be very a life-consuming thing. I thought the first time I'd just write a short essay about the way these people on this island had been affected by this. It turned into this multi-year project and involved going down to Florida all the time and driving up to prisons and jails, interviewing people and going to detectives. That’s just my way of saying I had no idea what I was getting into and I'm still not sure what the full ramifications of it are. I would love to never write anything this dark again. It took a toll on me very much emotionally, just terrible dreams and the stress of wanting to make sure you weren't doing something that would really hurt somebody's feelings or damage their lives in any unnecessary way. I'd like to move on to something a little bit lighter.

  Did this book turn you into a true crime person now?

  It's funny though because I get the allure. All through this process I've been trying to understand what that allure is and why I feel it. I guess as a kid, I remember going to the library and finding Sherlock Holmes on the shelf and not even making it to the checkout counter. I just stood there and read the book cover to cover, because I was so engrossed. It’s not even like that's fantastic literature, but there is something captivating about it. It's not as though it doesn't exist somewhere in me, but definitely I feel like the thing that motivated me was just wanting to describe the life of a relationship, what it's like for two people to fall apart or stay together.

  It's really haunting because it is a human story. It's not just a story about a crime. It's a story about a community and about a woman and about a killer and this confluence of events in which you do feel the almost cruel randomness of it.

  It's just made it hard for me to read the paper. Especially just because that part of Florida, when I talk to reporters down there, it's like, “This is not that crazy of a crime. There are people getting chopped up and stuffed in sewer drains all the time.”

  Sure, because Florida.

  It's a disconcerting way to look at society.

  That there is a certain degree of humanity or pathos in true crime that really fascinates me. Yours is a story about a person who becomes enmeshed in all sides of it — from the victim to the perpetrator — and what happens when you find yourself at that crossroads. It makes you confront uncomfortable feelings about the perpetrators.

  People do things, and I include myself in this, that they don't understand. Maybe for reasons that are very dim and historical. That to me is a fascinating question — why do we the incomprehensible things we do?

QUOTED: "Reads like a mashup of at least three different books in one, written with psychological insight and literary flair but lacking cohesion and focus."

Wood, Cutter: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wood, Cutter LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE Algonquin (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-61620-730-4

A fledgling writer tackles a true-crime story and, in the process, discovers some uncomfortable truths about himself.

As a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, Wood learned of a murder and arson at the Tampa-area motel where he'd recently stayed. There was no body, weapon, or motive, but the woman, Sabine, who co-owned the motel with her estranged husband, had gone missing. Her car was found with somebody else driving it, a man with a shady past. Less than two weeks later, the motel was torched. There were three suspects: Sabine's estranged husband, her ex-con boyfriend who had done odd jobs at the motel, and the stranger driving her car. Wood felt like he didn't belong in Iowa and was suffering something of the imposter syndrome as a would-be writer with nothing to write. After his mother sent him a news clipping about the crime, he writes, "I found in this fiery motel everything necessary to write." The most conventional part of the story follows a familiar true-crime format, culminating in a confession that solves the mystery. But along the way, the book becomes more about Wood and how he stumbled into a relationship with a woman he didn't know as well as he should have. He finds eerie parallels between this relationship and the one that he imagines developed between the woman who is now missing and likely murdered and her boyfriend, a prime suspect who was returned to prison on a parole violation. As the author began to sense "the creeping entanglement" of the stories, "a sharp nausea crept over me." The narrative then shifts into Wood's projected account of exactly what happened, how the romance developed between the ex-con and the woman, and how she died. It's as much about what he sees in himself as it is about what might have happened to somebody else.

Reads like a mashup of at least three different books in one, written with psychological insight and literary flair but lacking cohesion and focus.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wood, Cutter: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248063/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7dd70dc2. Accessed 21 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248063

QUOTED: "Those who appreciate style and creativity, which Wood has in abundance, will enjoy this."

Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime.

By Cutter Wood.

Apr. 2018. 240p. Algonquin, $26.95 (9781616207304). 364.1.

Part true crime and part memoir, Wood's debut, at its heart, is a work of creative nonfiction that explores the conflicts that exist within every relationship. In the small Gulf Coast Florida town of AnnaMaria, Sabine Musil-Buehler has gone missing. She and her husband own a motel, where the author is staying when the search for Sabine ramps up. When Wood returns home to his new relationship with an old school friend, he has difficulty thinking of much besides the search for Sabine. When the Musil-Buehler's motel is set ablaze, Wood returns and even befriends one of the suspects, Sabine's lover, who is currently in jail. In descriptive and impressive prose, Wood gives us his version of what happened and why. What could bring someone--seemingly caught up in the quiet monotony of daily life, just like the rest of us--to murder? Wood's focus on his own life will distract true-crime fans, who will be disappointed with the lack of actual crime or investigation. But those who appreciate style and creativity, which Wood has in abundance, will enjoy this.--Kathy Sexton

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 5. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094343/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd8db5a3. Accessed 21 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094343

QUOTED: "Wood's impressionistic prose is on display throughout."
"Readers of literary nonfiction will find a promising new writer."

Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime
Publishers Weekly. 265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p49+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime

Cutter Wood. Algonquin, $26.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-61620-730-4

Wood combines elements of true crime with the techniques of contemporary fiction in his bold debut, which recounts the investigation into the 2008 murder of Sabine Musil-Buehler, a Gulf Coast Florida motel owner. Wood, who was a guest at the motel when the investigation began, first sequesters the facts of the crime and lines up the persons of interest: the victim's husband, her boyfriend, and the man who stole her car after her death. He then departs from the crime story to explore the fallibility of relationships--including his own romantic entanglements--as well as the untrustworthiness of facts in general. "As the Sarasota reporter had explained to me, if I wanted the truth, I would have to make it up," Wood writes. Indeed, he pumps up his imagination to rework Musil-Buehler's murder into the consequence of a doomed love affair between the victim and her killer. Wood's impressionistic prose is on display throughout; in one particularly ambitious passage, he places the motel fire that followed the owner's death among a history of fires including "the burning of the heretic Jan Hus, whose pyre would not catch until an old rag woman, hoping to be helpful, offered the soldiers involved her bundle of twigs." Readers of literary nonfiction will find a promising new writer. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 49+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c0ee25d. Accessed 21 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888922

QUOTED: "Wood's prose is detailed yet deft."
"This is a fine true-crime mystery and a touching journey into the human heart."

BOOKS IN BRIEF
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). (Apr. 23, 2018): Lifestyle: p8E.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
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Byline: CHRIS HEWITT; JOHN REINAN; STAFF WRITERS

Love and Death in the Sunshine State By Cutter Wood. (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 225 pages, $26.95.) It's sometimes hard to tell where reality ends and imagination begins in this debut work. The book's promotional material likens it to Truman Capote's 1966 classic "In Cold Blood," calling it "a story that exists outside documentary evidence." Meaning: The bones of the tale are true, but author Cutter Wood makes liberal use of his imagination to flesh out scenes that couldn't possibly have happened exactly as he describes them. Journalistic tut-tutting aside, Wood's mixture of fact and art yields a tale both gritty and introspective, with a real murder providing an entree to an examination of the nature of love. Interviewing witnesses, poring through police and court files, Wood reveals the truth about the brutal death of a Florida motel keeper. But he also does much more, reaching back into his own memories to uncover precise, artfully rendered recollections of his own life and loves, juxtaposing them with the impending tragedy on Anna Maria Island. Wood's prose is detailed yet deft; he stops just short of laying on the writerly stuff too thick. Whenever he seems about to launch completely into the ether, he pulls back with a quick, pointed observation summing up the myriad thoughts, sensations and emotions that we've all experienced at crucial moments in our lives. This is a fine true-crime mystery and a touching journey into the human heart.

Cutter Wood will be at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls., at 7 p.m. April 25. JOHN REINAN Madness Is Better Than Defeat By Ned Beauman. (Knopf, 416 pages, $27.95.) It's a good thing the ornate "Madness Is Better Than Defeat" is studded with sly winks to the reader, such as, "I may as well carry on from where I left off (even if that is a nicety obsolete in these pages)," because a road map helps us navigate its daunting journey. The comic novel begins in Hollywood. Based on his nut-ball theory of rising and rising action, a young director earns the right to direct an epic on location at a South American temple. "Madness" then proceeds to hew to the director's theory, piling on narrative thread after narrative thread and toggling between two time frames. Two decades later, the film crew still hasn't returned from Honduras (nobody misses any of them?) and they're competing with a financier who wants to steal the temple. Author Ned Beauman, who is great at capturing the snappy patter of midcentury Hollywood and newspaper types, also throws in CIA machinations in "banana republics," several romances and numerous allusions to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (some of the circumstances of the film resemble Francis Ford Coppola's "Darkness" adaptation, "Apocalypse Now"). The novel is clever as all get-out, but, as it begins to resemble an attempt to smush four Kurt Vonnegut novels into one, it's also exhausting. CHRIS HEWITT

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"BOOKS IN BRIEF." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 23 Apr. 2018, p. 8E. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535893559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f9ea4034. Accessed 21 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A535893559

"Wood, Cutter: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248063/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7dd70dc2. Accessed 21 May 2018. Sexton, Kathy. "Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 5. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094343/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd8db5a3. Accessed 21 May 2018. "Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 49+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c0ee25d. Accessed 21 May 2018. "BOOKS IN BRIEF." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 23 Apr. 2018, p. 8E. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535893559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f9ea4034. Accessed 21 May 2018.

• Seattle Post Intelligencer
  https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-Life-and-Death-in-the-Sunshine-12804240.php
  Word count: 843

  QUOTED: "By leaving out some of the seemingly critical crime details and facts that would be highlighted in the standard true crime book sold in airport gift shop, Wood proves again that less is more. His "story of a crime" focuses on the small yet significant aspects of the lives of two people. In doing so, he brings the individuals to life. ... His is a respectful approach to human imperfection and frailty."

  Book Review: 'Life and Death in the Sunshine State: A Novel' by Cutter Wood

  By Joseph Arellano, BLOGCRITICS.ORG Published 10:00 pm, Monday, April 2, 2018

  Cutter Wood's book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State, is like the antidote to the typical true crime story. Wood, an MFA graduate in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, touched base with all of the principals about a murder that he felt somewhat connected with. You see, after graduating from Brown, he felt directionless - like Benjamin in The Graduate, so he spent months at a secluded hotel in Florida. The woman who ran the hotel with her husband later disappeared and Wood was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

  This book arrived at the right time. I had just finished reading a true crime book and found it to be sadly disappointing. The writer put down all the facts about a triple murderer and his trial but seemingly without context. When one sentence follows another in this manner - without drama, suspense or the seeming presence of actual people, it's far less than engaging.

  Wood knew some of the principals involved and was also given access to the man suspected of killing the missing woman. But once the crime was solved, Wood felt that little was resolved. The facts did not seem to add up to a whole, complete story. Therefore, he elected to pursue a unique option.
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  Instead of writing a dry nonfiction account of the crime, Wood decided to write a fictional version of a relationship between a former criminal and successful married businesswoman whose lives intersected. It's a story of an unlikely attraction, a loving relationship, and a tragic ending. Wood never attempts to explain the crime or the murderer's mind, but paints the events - both real and imaginary - as something that was fated to occur.

  As Wood is free to explore events and scenarios that may or may not have played out, he develops a story that feels fully real. This is not Law and Order - a stereotypical version of crime and justice, nor is it a fly-over account of a crime developed for a one hour cable TV network show. It is a story of two imperfect people who were drawn to each other for all of the wrong reasons.

  By leaving out some of the seemingly critical crime details and facts that would be highlighted in the standard true crime book sold in airport gift shop, Wood proves again that less is more. His "story of a crime" focuses on the small yet significant aspects of the lives of two people. In doing so, he brings the individuals to life and causes us to mourn - in a quiet, dignified way, the loss of one of them.

  It's a sad, tough story but Cutter Wood takes the reader to the heart of the matter. His is a respectful approach to human imperfection and frailty.

  I look forward to reading Wood's future works.

  Highly recommended.

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