Winner – 2025 Killer Nashville Claymore Award!
Madam Coroner: A Memoir of Death and Politics in Suburbia
Awarded the Claymore for best unpublished nonfiction book, Madam Coroner is an eye-opening memoir about one coroner’s life and many deaths over a four-year period bookended by the opioid epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Elected the first woman coroner in her county’s 219-year history, Christina VandePol faces a suburban underworld of drug deaths, murder-suicides, unclaimed remains, and overflowing morgues. But it’s the living, not the dead, who pose the biggest obstacle to her fight for transparency and justice.
Madam Coroner is scheduled to be published in late 2026 by Exposit Books, an imprint of McFarland & Co. Watch my newsletter for updates.
Upcoming and Recent Presentations
- Coroners of Pennsylvania: A Field Guide, Special Event, Main Line School Night, October 8, 2025, “the fascinating history and little-known powers of coroners…”
- Death, Drugs, and Toxins: A Primer for Writers, Killer Nashville International Writers Conference, August 23, 2025, with fellow physician and writer Jen Evans
- Autopsies: Facts and Fictions, DelVal Chapter, Sisters in Crime, April 19, 2025
Essays
- Guilty Verdict, February 2025, Months to Years
- Second Chances, September 2024, The Rumpus
- Falls: A Leading Cause of Accidental Death, Summer 2024, Chester County Medicine
- The Ghost Room, July 2024, Killer Nashville Magazine
- Teeth: Creative nonfiction piece, August 2022 issue, The Sun Magazine (Readers Write)
Reports
- Coroner/Medical Examiner Services in Pennsylvania: A multi-year study using qualitative and quantitative surveys and public information. Conducted under a grant from the Center for Rural PA. Full study here. PDF executive summary here.
- Letter from the Coroner – 2021 Annual Report: The letters I wrote for the department’s annual report were a personal reflection on both highlights and disappointments of the year, never more so than during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. My last letter is provided here as a PDF. Full reports for this and previous years are available on the Chester County Coroner’s Office website.