Goodreads asked Helen Barrell:

What are you currently working on?

Helen Barrell I'm currently working on my second book for Pen & Sword - Fatal Evidence: Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor & the Dawn of Forensic Science. This came out of my research for Poison Panic - Taylor was the expert witness in nearly all the trials I came across; he was one of the country's leading toxicological experts. I went off on a tangent, researching Taylor, and became quite obsessed with him! He worked on hundreds of cases in the 19th century - some of the cases are quite famous, too. It wasn't all poisonings, either. His reputation suffered somewhat thanks to the William Palmer and Thomas Smethurst trials, and I think this makes him an interesting figure - he's not perfect, he made mistakes. Fatal Evidence will be published in 2017.

And I'm still plugging away at my 1930s gothic romance, Shadows of the Scar. I don't know if it'll ever be published, but I've always written fiction, so I'm not stopping now.

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