Amy Biehl, the American Fulbright scholar murdered in Gugulethu on August 25 1993, gets the In Cold Blood treatment in Justine van der Leun's We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation (Fourth Estate).That, at least, is the line pushed by Van der Leun's publishers. It's a claim that seems to have impressed Mark Gevisser. Writing in the New York Times, he said where the book was "gripping, explosive even, is in the kind of obsessive forensic investigation - of the clues, and into the soul of society - that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths" such as In Cold Blood author Truman Capote.But in the London Sunday Times, Stephen Robinson suggested the opposite: Van der Leun was no Capote and her book "is far too long, with too much cod history of the liberation struggle. It is also punctuated with great stretches of supposed verbatim dialogue that can only have been based on faulty memory and is therefore suspect".Biehl's death, Robinson concludes, was grim enough, but the aftermath was even more depressing. It was difficult to disagree with a cop's assessment of the men who killed her: "They were just bloody hooligans."ROCK & ROLLIn 2013, author and former NME stalwart Paul Morley accepted a challenge to be a living-art installation at the David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A in London: he set up a desk in the entrance hall and attempted to write a book about the singer in a weekend. "He typed furiously," Mark Ellen wrote in the London Sunday Times, "occasionally disturbed by people asking for directions to the lavatories and distracted by small children sporting Ziggy Stardust facial lightning bolts."When Bowie died on January 10 this year, Morley settled on what he considered a suitable reaction to the loss of an artist he'd greatly admired since 1970: he would write a book on Bowie in just 10 weeks. This, Morley reveals in that book, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference (Simon & Schuster), would have given him "the equivalent conditions that Bowie would have had when he made an album in the crowded, fluctuating 1970s, but without what became for a time his preferred diet.the four packs of titanically strong Gitanes, the cocaine, the red peppers and indeed the milk straight from the carton".It's not known if Morley managed to finish it in 10 weeks or not - the jury's out on that one - but the notices for The Age of Bowie have been largely positive. Ellen called it "a love letter between hard covers" and, writing in The Observer, Barney Hoskyns described it as "a thrilling hymn to a brilliant and beloved 'song and dance man' - the missing link, as the book wryly suggests, between Sammy Davis Jr and Samuel Beckett".THE BOTTOM LINE"It is not hopeless, but it is hard." - The Price of Prosperity: Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them by Todd G Buchholz (Harper)..