About the Book

"Crossed Over" is the wrenching but clear-eyed account of a novelist's unlikely friendship with the death-row inmate Karla Faye Tucker, whose religious conversion in prison made her capital sentence a nationwide controversy. Includes a new Foreword that recounts Tucker's last days and Lowry's experiences at the execution. Soon to be a CBS Television Movie starring Diane Keaton and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Book Synopsis

The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son's death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker's innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes -- committed with a pickaxe -- and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863.

Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over the course of several years she listened to the tragic story of her life before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her own life and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is a memoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profound and genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting room on death row. Now with a new foreword that recounts Tucker's last days and Lowry's experiences at her execution, Crossed Over is also an intimate portrait of a life gone tragically awry and then redeemed behind bars.

Review Quotes

"A tremendous literary achievement.... Lowry's power of empathy is astonishing.... Mesmerizing."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Immensely disturbing...offers us a vision of other lives-lives that, like it or not, we are unable to forget."-Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

"An extraordinary book...about redemption, about how one superlatively messed up girl...went straight. Just in time to die."-Anna Quindlen, The Denver Post

"Undeniably gripping. No reader is going to forget it overnight." --The Houston Post

About the Author

Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels. She lives in Washington, D.C.