Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir

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.)