Eight true crime books that combine the personal and the literary

Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight true crime books that combine the personal and the literary, including:

Beverly Lowry, Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir (Vintage)

In this unusual book Lowry, a novelist, recounts the hit-and-run death of her son as she begins to visit one of the most notorious female murders in history, Karla Faye Tucker, who committed her crime in the Houston area where Lowry lived. Tucker, on imprisoned for stabbing two people she was burglarizing with a pickaxe, was an unusual death row inhabitant. Not many women end up on death row, let alone being executed, as Tucker was in late 1984. Lowry begins to visit Tucker because she needed something to help her grieve her lost son, but the friendship Tucker and Lowry develop goes both ways. Tucker also lost a son, Peter, and recounts a biography full of violence and heartbreak which bonds the unlikely pair of women together.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue