Awards

• Winner of Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Fact Crime) 1999

Overview

On January 22, 1994, two-year old Renee Goode played happily with her sisters and cousin, as the four of them enjoyed an impromptu ""slumber party"" at the home of her father, Shane Goode. The next day she was dead. The local medical examiner could not determine the cause of little Renee's death. But her mother Annette and grandmother Sharon were convinced she'd been murdered--and that they knew the identity of Renee's killer: her handsome father, Shane Goode, a manipulative, emotionally abusive man who displayed virtually no interest in Renee--until he took out a $50,000 insurance policy on her life. With the help of a courageous female police investigator and Assistant DA, Sharon launched a case against Shane and had Renee's tiny coffin, lovingly filled with her favorite stuffed animals, exhumed from its final resting place. And her small corpse revealed what her grandmother had suspected all along: cold, calculating Shane Goode had murdered his own daughter to cash in on her death. To the Last Breath is the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.

Full Product Details

9780312968199

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Reviews

A tragedy is rendered toothless as Stowers examines a child's murder in a tiny town in Texas. Veteran crime journalist and Edgar Award winner Stowers (Open Secrets, 1994; Sins of the Son, 1995; etc.) here studies the mysterious demise of Renee Goode, two years old at the time of her death in Alvin, Tex. Her mother, Annette, and grandmother Sharon Crouch immediately suspect Annette's creepy ex-husband, Shane. Renee had been conceived during a brief reconciliation between the two, and Shane had insisted that Annette abort the fetus; failing that, he simply ignored Renee. After the divorce, Shane relented and after one year asked to see Renee. The little girl was terrified of her father and hated to go to his house, but Annette felt obligated to encourage the relationship between daughter and father. One terrible night, Annette received a shocking call: Renee, who had been sleeping at her father's house, was dead. The coroner ruled the death natural and did only a cursory autopsy. Annette and her mother, Sharon, a sometime private investigator, sprang into action. After both the police and the medical examiner's office rejected their claim of foul play, they researched on their own and discovered that Shane had taken out a life insurance policy on little Renee weeks before her death. Sue Dietrich, an Alvin police officer, took over the moribund case and took it to trial, where Shane was convicted of murder. While the case is certainly horrible, Stowers fails to elevate it to an outrage; the writing is stiff and the characters read like a shallow combination of blue-collar and Nancy Drew. The police work until the entrance of Dietrich was truly shoddy and ruined what should have been an open-and-shut case, but Stowers's account simply doesn't crackle with the energy the three women poured into getting justice. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Carlton Stowers is the author of more than two dozen works of nonfiction, including the Edgar Award-winning Careless Whispers, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Innocence Lost, and Open Secrets. He and his wife live in Cedar Hill, Texas.

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