On December 16, 2000, 31-year-old real estate appraiser Mike Williams left his Tallahassee, Fla., home to go duck hunting on nearby Lake Seminole. He never returned to his wife, Denise, and daughter, Anslee, but it took nearly 17 years to uncover the shocking story behind his death and its aftermath. Mikita Brottman (The Solitary Vice, An Unexplained Death) describes a lurid tale of sexual intrigue and betrayal in a tight-knit faith community in her smart, fast-paced Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida.
Mike and Denise shared a close friendship with Brian Winchester and his wife, Kathy. Both couples married in 1994, but by 1997, Denise and Brian had begun an affair. It took them three years to formulate and act on the scheme to murder Mike, and on that morning, Brian shot his close friend and buried his body miles away, where it remained undiscovered until October 2017.
Brottman, who holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford and is trained in psychoanalysis, usefully brings these elements of her background to this project. The spirits of Dostoevsky and Poe hover over the story. Her reflections on Brian and Denise's complicated inner lives, especially when she's interrogating their attempt to rationalize their deeds with their Christian faith, or examining Brian's longtime sex addiction and his painful unraveling, help shape the book's intriguingly multidimensional account. The tragic tale of a couple whose lust overpowers their inhibitions and drives them to commit a heinous crime is hardly new, but as Brottman demonstrates with freshness and verve in Guilty Creatures, that doesn't make it an any less engrossing one. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer