Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Shortly after a hit-and-run driver killed her son Peter in 1984, Texas novelist Lowry ( Breaking Gentle ) began visiting Karla Faye Tucker, a death-row prisoner in Mountain View, Tex., who was convicted with her boyfriend for the 1983 pickaxe murders of an acquaintance and his lover. In due course Lowry read Tucker's trial transcript and interviewed the judge, Tucker's defense attorneys and the jail chaplain. There is little further investigation or much sense of where Lowry is going with any of this material. She seems as lost about what to make of Tucker's death sentence as she is about what meaning to derive from her son's death. But what we learn about Tucker's prison habilitation is instructive: her mother, a prostitute, was 13 when Tucker, the girl's third daughter, was born; Tucker started using drugs before she was 10. Also of value is the rare glimpse the book provides of prison life for a woman on death row. (Aug.)

Library Journal

The murder weapon is a pickaxe, and the killer is 23-year-old Karla Faye Tucker, who readily admits to the crime, even stating she felt sexual gratification during the killing. Sensational media copy. In a mixture of true crime and memoir held together by a fiction writer's rich language, novelist Lowry ( Breaking Gentle , LJ 8/88) uses prison interviews and speculation about Karla from her family's snapshots to unveil an upbringing of substance abuse and prostitution. The night of the murders, Karla, having become a hardened woman living on the edge, crossed over to a realm where rage and violence replace law and order. Through sometimes tenuous comparisons, Lowry also contrasts events of her life to those of Karla, now on death row. Lowry tells of her son Peter, killed in a hit-and-run incident. Questioning her parenting, recalling his childhood and later brushes with the law, she concerns herself with what happened in between, ``before and after,'' in both the life of her son and Karla. Recommended for true crime collections.-- Robert Hodder, Memorial Univ . of Newfoundland Lib., St. John's

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Lowry (Breaking Gentle, 1988, etc.) delivers a stunning work of nonfiction, charting the growth of a strange but healing intimacy between herself and a young woman prisoner sentenced to die for a gruesome murder. In 1988, Lowry was still in the state of numbness that had arisen four years earlier when her 17-year-old son Peter had died in a hit-and-run accident. Peter had been troubled, and in trouble, for years, and Lowry's grief was compounded by an obscure sense of guilt at somehow having failed him as a mother. Then she read about Karla Faye Tucker in The Houston Chronicle, her hometown paper. Karla fascinated Lowry with the contrast between her innocent prettiness and the horror of her crime—the motiveless, drug- impelled pickaxe murder of a hated acquaintance and his female companion. The luridness of Karla's background—she was a call-girl mom who taught her two daughters her trade and shot heroin with them—made her story even more compelling. Lowry requested an interview, and Karla agreed, beginning a series of monthly visits in which the women shared details of their respective tragedies, as well as a lot of plain old restorative girl-talk. That Karla is Lowry's substitute child, the one she can do right by to make up for her self-perceived failure with Peter, and that Lowry is the good mother Karla never had, is an unavoidable inference—but there is more to this complex relationship: a shared taste between Lowry and Karla for mystery and impulse, and a mutual amazement as to "how much happiness you can find within completely unacceptable givens." Gripping true-crime details and marvelous local color in Lowry's rendering of the wild, heartlessboomtown of Houston make this a real page-turner. But most remarkable is the author's insight into the human capacity for extremes of violence and tenderness, brutality and nobility.