Love and Death in the Sunshine State

The Story of a Crime

De: Cutter Wood

Narrado por: Joe Barrett

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.

©2018 Cutter Wood (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Terrible, couldn't get past the 3rd chapter

Instead of focusing on the 2008 homicide on Anna Maria Island, the author writes more of an autobiography. Sabine's tragic story is almost an afterthought, an anecdotal filler in between the author's irrelevant an unrelated stories of his college furniture, grandfather's funeral and exploits with a high school crush. During the first two chapters I repeatedly checked to see if I was even listening to the correct audiobook. Between this and the narrator's voice, I stopped listening by the 3rd chapter. If you are interested in this story, I recommend you look elsewhere and save both your money and time.

don't bother

Worst book I have ever TRIED to listen to. I have been trying to get through it for 2 weeks-can't do it-Do not waste your time or money

Really -- why bother?

This is truly one of the worst audible books I've ever tried to get through. There is very little having to do with the crime other than supposition. Instead, the reader faces a blathering remembrance of the author's middle school schedule and what he had for lunch there. And there was a mustard-colored couch in a motel room. The crime involved an arson so he gives a list of famous fires -- including the Great London Fire, as reported by Pepys. It seems that citing was only in the book as a way of showing how erudite the author is -- he keeps mentioning authors' names but doesn't say anything about what they had to say that might be relevant to the case. The padding is criminal -- there was a dead dog on the side of the road. If I had wanted to read a memoir about his life, I wouldn't have looked in the true crime genre. I was embarrassed about how Wood kept describing people in cruel ways -- their enormous stomachs or big ears. People he should have interviewed -- a police officer with the big ears, say -- aren't even identified by name. He suddenly realizes in the book that he hasn't even investigated the case -- no shit, Sherlock. The only thing I really gained from this book was to be more suspicious of anything written in the non-fiction program in the Iowa writers program, where he was teaching. His writing is florid, the sort of language a writer employs to really impress someone -- in this case, himself. Usually, I can find something good to say about a book; for this one, I'm sorry I was even forced to give it a single star.