`CROSSED OVER' IS A PROVOCATIVE MURDER/MEMOIR

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993                   TAG: 9301030206
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by LANA WHITED staff
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`CROSSED OVER' IS A PROVOCATIVE MURDER/MEMOIR
CROSSED OVER: A MURDER, A MEMOIR. By Beverly Lowry. Knopf. $22.
Readers who expect "Crossed Over" to be "In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's Song" will be disappointed. As the subtitle, "A Murder, A Memoir," implies Beverly Lowry's latest work is not a "true crime" book.
"Crossed Over" has the true crime element - the story of two Texans beaten and hacked to death over motorcycle parts and petty jealousies. But those victims' story is swallowed by the story of one of the killers, Karla Faye Tucker, then 23, who in her newspaper photo looks like a cheerleader but was instead "a full-time addict and part-time prostitute" before she hit high school.
Tucker's story is, in turn, engulfed by Lowry's own story, and it is every parent's nightmare - waking up in the wee morning hours with the teen-age son still not home and the police at the door. The death that sets Lawry's story in motion is not the murder Karla Faye Tucker committed, but the unsolved hit-and-run death of her own son Peter, 18, whose troubled adolescence Lowry clearly identifies with Karla Faye's.
Lowry was never deceived about where her focus would lie. "This story," she writes, "was Karla's voice. . . . The story was what I was doing on Death Row, what questions I asked and avoided and what her story did to and for me."
Lowry's book is about her evolution (her "crossing over") from seeing Karla Faye as a victimizer, to seeing her as also a victim. The theme is redemption - Karla Faye's on death row and Beverly Lowry's in a prison waiting room. Lowry articulates her own lesson with characteristic moral simplicity: "We don't have the right to forgive or avenge. To one another, we offer aspirins. There's little else to give."
"Crossed Over" is a strange and provocative book, often overwritten but appropriately structured, beginning with Lowry's first meeting with Karla Faye and simultaneously working forward and backward - forward to Karla Faye's most recent round of appeals in May 1992 and backward to Peter's death in September 1984.
Lowry peels off layers of pain uncertainly, exploring foreign emotional territory, dissecting her own wounds with shaking hands. She wants us to see the pain that premature death can cause, and the only thing worse than what she already has experienced is that, in befriending Karla Faye, she probably has set herself up to experience it again.

Lana Whited teaches at Ferrum College and is working on a dissertation about homicide in non-fiction novels.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB