The newspaper column for June 2016 has been released, which is a little bittersweet as it will be unexpectedly the last column in the run. This is because this edition of the paper covers three months, as a summer special, and the next paper is due in September (if this matches the student readership’s residence, […]

Independent female sleuths, not just sidekicks, have been around since the start of the genre, pre-dating the appearance of female police detectives in real life: Susan Hopley was solving crimes in 1841, fifteen years before Kate Warne would join the Pinkertons, and the literary Mrs Gladden was busy in 1864, while the first woman didn’t […]

Review Aside a.k.a. the comments that don’t quite make it into a review… Updates Monthly. with thanks to wpclipart.com

The idea of a murder victim’s ghost returning to solve their own murder or punish the culprit is nothing new to horror fiction. However towards the end of the twentieth century a shift occurred: ghosts didn’t just come back to solve their own murders, they then stuck around to solve other people’s, most notably in […]

The Croydon Citizen is now out and we have our copy! The four reviews are on the inside back page at the end, and this time we have: Pineapple Lies by Amy Vansant Sorry, It’s not my Department by Rob Tape London Psychos by George Helman Nyssa Glass and the House of Mirrors by H.L.Burke […]

Review Aside a.k.a. the comments that don’t quite make it into a review… Updates Monthly. with thanks to wpclipart.com

The Croydon Citizen for April 2016 is out. The reviews are on Pg 18 at the bottom, with four more books covered: When the River Still Ran – A wonderful tale of a teacher turned hobo in Cornwall. Bullets – Crime, suspense and action in America’s deep south in this debut novel. Spring of Wonder […]

Review Aside a.k.a. the comments that don’t quite make it into a review… Updates Monthly. with thanks to wpclipart.com

The Croydon Citizen came out yesterday. The next set of reviews are on page 5, and with the included covers in colour this time. “Dinosaur Lake” by K. Meyer Griffiths – a monster story and adventure, when a dinosaur arises from a lake. “The Death Planner” by Gillan Larkin – a cozy mystery about an […]

We’ve changed the way the third party reviews run, and made a few more changes at the back end which have speeded the site up again. The loading time should be down to 2-3 seconds per page now, so the site should be running far better across the board. We’d really like to get a […]

There have been a few updates in the last few weeks, so this will be a long update. First, every Upcoming Book now has a function where readers can add reminders to their calendars on Google etc. The social buttons are back, thanks to Addthis, which runs more smoothly than the old set. There is […]

The Croydon Citizen 2016 is out, and with it our book review feature. This month it is on page 3 at the bottom,  so open the cover and find four ebooks staring at you! Our reviews this month are: Now by Wanda Jefferson – an emotionally wrenching and well-written poetry collection about the inner cities. […]

The January Newspaper column has been submitted, with four more reviews. Several of the authors have been notified on twitter or by email. However, we have been told the Citizen are skipping an issue in Feb, so the scheduled last feature will now be in July 2016. We’ve been asked about how this feature could […]

2015 has been a busy year. We’ve upgraded the mailserver, and the webserver, and had to move our mail to a third party when it reached 25,000 mails a week and our host complained. As a club this made money rather tight, so we moved to RiotAds, which unfortunately was a duff move as the […]

The Croydon Citizen December 2015 is out, and with it the indie ebooks column. We’re on page 10, at the bottom. With the new format, we reviewed four books: Shirley Link and the Safe Case by Ben Zackheim Reservoir Cats by Penel Ashworth SpiderStalk by D. Nathan Hillard Prunes for BreaKfast by John Searanke If […]