After Cop Town, her acclaimed ambitious rookie police procedural, Slaughter returns to the familiarly dark and chilling psycho territory she has so compellingly claimed as her own. Slasher Country'Pretty Girls' by Karin Slaughter (Cornerstone) R292 A young woman has gone missing and the news reminds Claire Scott of her own sister's disappearance 20 years earlier. Then her husband is murdered and the ride gets perversely unsettling and deliciously twisted.The issueThe intense, conflicted relationship between Vincent van Gogh and his art-dealer brother Theo is well-documented. Until recently, however, I was unaware of a third brother and his South African links, which are explored in an important new work from the historian and Anglo-Boer War specialist Chris Schoeman, The Unknown Van Gogh: The Life of Cornelis van Gogh from the Netherlands to South Africa (Zebra Press). Cor, as he was known, arrived here in 1889, aged 22, and worked as an engineer, first for a Germiston mining company and then for the railways. He sided with the Boers in the war but, suffering from fever, ended up in a hospital in Brandfort in 1900, where he committed suicide by shooting himself, supposedly like his brother had done 10 years earlier. Schoeman's biography tells this young man's story, as revealed in his letters, and describes the relationship with his brother, Vincent.The latter's own letters, meanwhile, provide an extraordinary insight to an artistic genius and one of the most haunting presences in modern Western culture. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Ronald de Leeuw (Penguin Classics), is highly recommended, as is Van Gogh: The Life (Profile Books), the exhaustive 990-page biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.Crash courseBritish troops preparing for the Normandy landings in World War 2 were given a manual that explained: "By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point."This nugget is from the Mauritian-born political and cultural historian Sudhir Hazareesingh's wry and fascinating work on a nation "whose attachment to the realm of ideas is intense", How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (Allen Lane). There are the predictable digs at the structuralist fad of the 1960s, but Hazareesingh gets serious about the "declinism" of recent years, the intellectual pessimism and lack of influence of current French critical thought. Would, I wonder, anyone attempt a similar examination of South African intellectualism? Would anyone care?The bottom line"Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls." - Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (Penguin Press)..