Typically I am not drawn to true crime books. However, I couldn’t resist LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE, partly due to its premise and my occasional fascination with Florida. Author Cutter Wood became a part of the flora and fauna that comprised the story and, to a certain extent, its outcome. I am glad I picked up this gem of a book.

Its genesis begins with Wood, who, during the occurrence of the majority of the events here, is a graduate student at the University of Iowa. His involvement with Florida comes into play when he fulfills a familial duty by visiting some once- or twice-removed family members on the Gulf Coast. While there, he stays at a small, family-run motel located on a tiny island just off the coast. Once his trip ends, he goes back to Iowa with no plans of returning to the Sunshine State.

Everything changes, though, when he learns a short time later that Sabine Musil-Buehler, one of the co-owners of the motel, has gone missing and that a portion of the motel was set on fire. The police suspect foul play and have focused on three persons of interest. Two are obvious: Tom Buehler, Sabine’s husband, with whom she owned the motel, and her boyfriend William Cumber, an ex-convict who was employed there as a handyman. The third is the wonderfully named Robert Corona, a hapless drunk who was stopped while driving Sabine’s bloodstained automobile subsequent to her disappearance.

"[Wood's] prose is full of quietly haunting phrases borne out of his observations of people who are by turns simple and complex, harmless and frightening, predictable and impulsive."

Wood became drawn to and then obsessed with the case due in great part to his stay at the motel but also because of a relationship he was establishing with Erin, who he previously had known in middle school and worshipped from afar. A happenstance meeting with her resulted in their putting together what had never happened, if you will. A good deal of the book’s first half examines Wood’s relationship with her as it expands and retracts, often held together by its own momentum and little else. Wood also describes the results of his own research in Florida, speaking with law enforcement and reporters, along with Buehler and Cumber.

The stories of the remaining two-thirds of the love triangle are fascinating trainwrecks in their own ways, with Buehler’s particularly of note. The police, confident that he has murdered the missing Sabine, have arrested him on a parole violation, so he sits in prison protesting his innocence to Wood while cajoling the author to send him books. Wood is also an important character in his own account. It seems everyone confuses him with at least one other author with a somewhat similar name, a state of affairs that Wood greets with implicit amusement and perhaps just a touch of frustration.

But it is in the second half of LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE where Wood shares with us the opening pages of the book that he envisioned, in which he gathers the evidence and sorts it out but is abruptly stopped when the guilty party confesses, giving the reader and the author the what, why and how of the deed. The tale ends with Wood expounding on a fascinating topic --- the chance encounters that result in relationships and that ripple outward from the lives of those involved, heedless of consequence. It’s unlike anything I have read recently, understated but powerful and full of subtle angst.

Wood is primarily known as a magazine essayist, but this, his first full-length work, shows that he is more than capable of working well on a larger canvas. His prose is full of quietly haunting phrases borne out of his observations of people who are by turns simple and complex, harmless and frightening, predictable and impulsive. About two thirds of the way through his statement, he drops a phrase about a lover’s suspicions, which is simply one of the best lines I have ever read. This is not a long story, but it runs deep. You won’t be able to drive past one of those independent mom and pop motels --- swiftly vanishing from the American highway --- without thinking of it.