Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime
    Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime
    Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime
    Audiobook6 hours

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

    Written by Cutter Wood

    Narrated by Joe Barrett

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When a stolen car is recovered on the Gulf Coast of Florida, it sets off a search for a missing woman, local motel owner Sabine Musil-Buehler. Three men are named persons of interest-her husband, her boyfriend, and the man who stole the car-and the residents of Anna Maria Island, with few facts to fuel their speculation, begin to fear the worst. Then, with the days passing quickly, her motel is set on fire, her boyfriend flees the county, and detectives begin digging on the beach.

    Cutter Wood was a guest at Musil-Buehler's motel as the search for the missing woman gained momentum, and he found himself drawn steadily deeper into the case. Driven by his own need to understand how a relationship could spin to pieces in such a fatal fashion, he began to meet with the eccentric inhabitants of Anna Maria Island, with the earnest but stymied detectives, and with the affable man soon presumed to be her murderer. But there is only so much that interviews and records can reveal; in trying to understand why we hurt those we love, this book, like Truman Capote's classic In Cold Blood, tells a story that exists outside of documentary evidence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 17, 2018
    ISBN9781684413393
    Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime

    Related to Love and Death in the Sunshine State

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Fierce Fight

      Jan 7, 2021

      A Fierce Fight
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Monsters Walking Free

      Apr 4, 2021

      The infamous Easey Street murders remain as much of a mystery today as when they occurred more than 40 years ago. In January 1977, neighbours had noticed something amiss at the home of Suzanne Armstrong, 28, and Susan Bartlett, 27. They’d heard whi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dahleen Glanton: A Kid Charged With His Friend's Murder During A Botched Burglary In 2008 Got A Second Chance. The Teens Charged In Suburban Chicago Deserve One Too

      Aug 27, 2019

      Eleven years ago, a group of teenagers broke into a house near Rockford, Ill., planning to steal a cache of guns. The boys had meticulously planned the burglary. They knew the homeowner, who was supposed to be in the hospital that night. The house wa

      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’

      Aug 6, 2020

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’
      4 min read

    • Article

      Murdered By A Monster On Christmas Eve

      Dec 14, 2020

      It should have been a magical time for the Petersons. It was Christmas 2002 and school teacher Laci Peterson only had a month to go before giving birth to her first child. Laci and her husband, Scott, had the holiday season to prepare for their littl

      3 min read

    • Article

      How Scott Peterson's Murder Convictions Were Suddenly Thrown Into Doubt

      Oct 16, 2020

      SAN FRANCISCO - Laci Peterson's 2002 disappearance from her Modesto, Calif., home on Christmas Eve made instant headlines. Her family initially said that Scott, her husband, was beyond suspicion. Then a woman surfaced who said she was having an affai

      4 min read

    • Article

      Killer curiosity

      Apr 29, 2021

      Killer curiosity
      3 min read

    • Article

      Have You Seen This Boy?

      May 22, 2021

      THE Lee Mentoor who stares from the poster is older, his forehead has broadened and he carries the casual smile of a school boy. Here Liyaqat Mentoor, better known as Lee, is 7 years old, and if he looks anything like this, it means he is alive. The

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books

      Mar 10, 2022

      Crime fiction may desire order out of chaos, but true crime grapples with the chaos while hoping for catharsis in the meantime. These 10 books helped me make sense of the world's darkest corners. The post Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books appeared

      4 min read

    • Article

      Guilty

      May 20, 2021

      Guilty
      1 min read

    • Article

      A Deadly Liaison

      May 21, 2020

      A Deadly Liaison
      3 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      Notes From The Ashes

      Jun 16, 2019

      Notes From The Ashes
      5 min read

    • Article

      White Silence

      Dec 22, 2020

      White Silence
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Road to Paradise and Back

      Dec 1, 2022

      The Road to Paradise and Back
      23 min read

    • Article

      Finding Home

      Jul 5, 2022

      Finding Home
      4 min read

    • Article

      #omafomo

      May 30, 2019

      #omafomo
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Love and Death in the Sunshine State

    3.5/5

    15 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Loved every page of this book from start to finish.
    • 4/5
      Very well written, though the story is not compelling. Excellent narration—Joe Barrett is one of the top three narrators.

      I will read or listen to other books by Cutter Wood.
    • 5/5
      When one looks for insights into the difficulties of maintaining a romantic relationship, the disappearance and murder of a married woman by her ex-inmate boyfriend seems an unlikely totem, but totem Cutter Wood makes of it—and therein finds a trove.In Love and Death in the Sunshine State, Wood wants to uncover nothing less than a grand coherence in the human experience. Just past the book’s midpoint he writes, “I had no interest in the murder; I knew that I could never commit such a crime. But I recognized a kinship, however faint, between that act and the uncaring words that had already become a habit in my own relationship.” It’s an engrossing approach, and it turns a book you at first think is about a homicide into a book about the ordinary ways in which love fails to save us. As well, it’s a pleasure to watch Wood subvert the genre in which he putatively writes. Each sentence indicts sentimentality, refuses to leer at the macabre. Throughout, the author gapes not at horror but at mundanity. Here he is looking at photographs taken by detectives of the apartment where the attack occurred: “I was drawn to these images, I think, precisely because of how commonplace they seemed….On a side table, there is a scorecard for a board game, an empty wine bottle, and a remote control. They reminded me of the aimless photographs that children take, confusing precisely because it is impossible to say just why they were taken. They seemed almost like they could have come from any life.” And that’s the point, to focus on shared impulses within human intimacy. Does he pass judgment on his subjects? If so, he equally and cerebrally indicts himself, and, implicitly—this is the grand connection—the reader. We all fail at times in our relationships, we all yearn to have done better, to have embraced love more fully.The prose is simply impeccable—lyrically lush yet absent of all ego; smart, savvy, and self-aware like an ideal train compartment companion; and—for all my observations I haven’t mentioned one of its most delightful points—it’s the funniest book of true crime I’ve read, the humor coming at distinct gemlike moments, e.g. “The motel formed a narrow horseshoe, the top of the U facing the road and a fallow field, the U’s bottom concealing—I could just hear its gurgle—a brook, where one could imagine a few abandoned grocery carts upended on the rocks or the kerchiefed remains of a missing Boy Scout.” A dry, human humor, if you will, pervades.
Throughout, Wood shows the courage to look open-eyed at the people and things around him and to document how he applies what he sees to his own life. He takes the artistic risk of reinventing the story from multiple perspectives, yet he sold me at every turn. Superbly written.
    • 4/5
      First time author Cutter Wood was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa when he was drawn to the story of the disappearance of a woman in Florida. Sabine was a motel owner on Anna Maria Island, near Tampa, when she disappeared. Her estranged husband, ex-con boyfriend, and the man who stole her abandoned car are all suspected. Wood is an author in search of a story to tell and he travels to Florida to interview the principals. The strongest part of the book is where he projects how the relationship between the ex-con and Sabine developed, and led to murder. The weakest is where he tries to create parallels with his own new relationship with the woman who was to become his wife.