Guilty Creatures: a book about how to have fun in Florida

by philg

For your Florida bookshelf: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman (British-born, resident in Manhattan, and a professor in Maryland so I’m not sure how she researched this book).

The characters in this true-crime drama have a Florida lifestyle that is 100 percent opposite mine. Instead of fighting with their HVAC equipment they’re out at clubs, concerts, fishing, hunting, mountain biking, etc. When there is nothing great to watch on TV, strippers and prostitutes can add zest to an evening. Things get a little complicated when a woman figures out that the best way to extend and enhance her lifestyle is for her husband to die. The author reminds us that fewer than half of murders in the U.S. are ever solved (about half of reported murders are “cleared” (state-sponsored NPR), but you have to consider that murders successfully disguised as accidents (“alligator involvement” in this case) aren’t part of the statistic).

I want to read some more books by Professor Dr. Brottman, D. Phil. Maybe I should start with this one:

4 thoughts on “Guilty Creatures: a book about how to have fun in Florida”

  1. A bizarre name for a British born female. It’s a male Belarusian name, equivalent of Nicholas, rather dated at that.

    • It also can be Ukrainian version of Nicholas. Real question is how do you mountain bike in Florida? Aren’t Appalachian Mountains start in Georgia, north of Florida? How dis I miss any hillside in my Florida travels? Maybe jumping from an alligator in Everglades count like mountain biking?

    • perplexed: the events happened in Tallahassee, which is about 20 miles from Georgia. Maybe “hill biking” would be a better description than “mountain biking”, but indeed the Appalachians begin in Alabama and Georgia just north of Tallahassee.

    • Philip, this https://en-us.topographic-map.com/map-d8nx/Tallahassee/ gives maximum elevation for Tallahassee area 302 ft, for total drop of a little over 200 ft. I’d call it cross-country or touring biking. Definitely not a mountain biking, it annoys me since I used to bike in the mountains frequently and still sometimes mountain-bike. I do bigger climbs and drops on my routine road biking rides.
      Based on statistically – generated author name, geographical birth/work/ living locations and selection of everything activities I suspect that this entire book is made – up by ML/LLM
      Then I thought that ML would have some constraints built-in, at lease geographical. Is it real?

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