Sandra Hempel is a former Times journalist who has written for a wide range of national newspapers and magazines. Her first book, The Medical Detective, looks at the struggle to understand the great cholera epidemics of the 19th century. It won the Tony Thistlethwaite Award and the British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science. Her second book, The Inheritor's Powder, was serialised on Radio 4 as a Book of the Week. It tells the story of an 1833 real-life murder mystery that resulted in the first reliable test for the presence of arsenic and marked the beginning of the science of forensic toxicology.
