We treat the tides as commonplace. We send monkeys into space as simply as if we were sending flowers to our mother. We fertilize our strawberries with the bones of ancient sharks and light our bathrooms by perturbing an isotope of uranium. We carry on unwondering in a world of explicable phenomena, and in this state of mind, how do we approach the subject of love?

Cutter Wood asks us to rethink in his debut book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime – which comes out today.

Wood wanted to get to the heart of what is called “an intimate homicide.” And he found that the only way to parse such a murder was to merge reporting and imagined narrative. He had, just a few weeks prior, stayed in the same hotel in which a murder had taken place, and he became so obsessed with the case that he began to meet with the murdered woman’s husband, her lover, and the detectives. This book is an attempt to understand not just the path that led to such a terrible place, but also how Wood’s own perspective colored his conclusions. As he explains, “A love affair only makes sense to the lovers, and so I wanted to tell the story as Bill and Sabine would have told it, a simple story, by necessity an act of the imagination, about two people who tried, and failed, to be in love.” More than anything this is an attempt to recast the true crime book as a psychological investigation.

This stunning combination of reportage and memoir, Love and Death in the Sunshine State will enthrall you with its writing (see the quote at the beginning of this post for proof of that wonderful writing) and its bold story. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body, describes the book perfectly as “a smart, engrossing true-life noir that weaves in meditations on love and the literary life, all set amid the palm trees and seedy motels of Florida’s steaming coastline.”

Read more about Love and Death in the Sunshine State.