Love and Death in the Sunshine State

January 15, 2018
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.