Off the crime beat for a recent Bowie biography, David Buckley's Strange Fascination: David Bowie - The Definitive Story. Unfortunately, perhaps not emotionally definitive, with mixed results. As a "read," it felt a wee bit flat, falling prey to the perpetual album-tour-album-tour syndrome which can kill both performers and their biographers. On the plus side, it's loaded with facts -- 600+ pages of text, with only two brief photo sections -- not a photo fluff book by any means. There are also lots of firsthand comments from Bowie collaborators through the decades -- Buckley did plenty of research of his own, not just cut and pasting from earlier work. And it does strike a nice balance, being neither a fan worship gusher or a hatchet job. I guess I'll say this is a solid meat 'n' potatoes accounting of a long and zig-zagging career, perhaps inevitably lacking in poetic flow. Bio's a tough gig, I reckon. Another opinion.