This year's gone girl already THIS YEAR'S GONE GIRL ALREADYThe Girl With the Red Coat by Kate Hamer (Faber & Faber) R215Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award, this compulsive, menacing and maze-like novel plays on every parent's worst fear - the abduction of a child. Here, eight-year-old Carmel, possessed of a dreamlike innocence, is tricked into disappearing at a local festival - yet she doesn't even know she's missing. A highly original chiller.THE ISSUEThe sad news of David Bowie's passing yesterday came as a shock - particularly as I'd been reading an extract from Mary Finnigan's Psychedelic Suburbia: David Bowie and the Beckenham Arts Lab (Jorvik Press) at the weekend. It's a rather charming, if brief, memoir.Finnigan had fled a bad marriage with her two kids when she took in a lodger, the 22-year-old Bowie, then a struggling, unheard of singer-songwriter, to make ends meet. That was in the spring of 1969, and Finnigan went from being his landlady to his lover and confidante in a matter of days. That summer, however, Space Oddity broke - and he blasted off, from the suburbs, into the big time like the proverbial.Finnigan's book, which came out on Friday, coincidentally the day Bowie released his latest album, Blackstar, sheds some light on the singer's early struggles and will no doubt be used as a source as other Bowie biographies are hastily updated.There are no shortage of these, but the ones to watch out for are Paul Trynka's Starman: David Bowie - The Definitive Biography (Sphere), which was praised as being the most compelling account yet of the artist's life when it was published in 2012, and David Buckley's authoritative Strange Fascination: David Bowie - The Definitive Story (Virgin). First published in 1999, it was given an update in 2005.For neophytes, Buckley also published an album by album listening guide last year, David Bowie: The Music & The Changes (Omnibus). For a more critical take, Dylan Jones's 2012 study, When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and the Four Minutes that Shook the World (Preface) is simply indispensable.CRASH COURSEHow should the average despot deal with the press? Anjan Sundaram's superb exposé on Rwandan rat-bag Paul Kagame's totalitarian squeeze on the fourth estate, Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (Bloomsbury) is most instructive. The usual methods are here - beatings, killings, bannings, and so on - but for sheer inventiveness, how about driving editors to self-destruction through paranoia? This happened, according to Sundaram, to a journalist who published information for mothers struggling to feed malnourished children which, alas, undermined the official narrative that Kagame had banished hunger forevermore.THE BOTTOM LINE"As long as we kept the quotas, we could do anything: destroy homes, property, jail people, even threaten to confiscate people's children, and no one would say anything." - One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong (Oneworld)..