THE THIRD M

I realize this is late, but I recently returned from vacation and read Robert Draper’s review of Beverly Lowry’s book, “Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir” (Aug. 9). I am impelled to comment.

One wonders why Draper virtually ignored the third element in the novelist/murderer equation (and the third M which Lowry chose to omit from her title): the murdered.

Karla Tucker and her boyfriend killed two innocent people in cold blood, heinously and without provocation. To label as “purifying” a book that, in the final analysis, may be considered no more than another in a series of aggrandizements of grizzly murders borders on travesty.

To say that the novelist’s “power of empathy is astonishing” is to show colossal misjudgment of her motives. To suggest that there is anything “rarefied” about the writings of an emotionally unstable chronicler who allowed herself to lose the objectivity she should have maintained (if she would call her work “true-crime”) but couldn’t, may not be within the purview of the competent reviewer.

Lowry, one suspects, wrote this story not, as Draper tells us, “as if her life depended on it,” but for the precise reason others dredge up very gory detail about the Jeffrey Dahmers and Hannibal Lechters of this world: because their pocketbooks depend on it.

MAGGIE ROTH, SUN VALLEY