The Evidence Against Her — Robb Forman Dew

On a bright September day in 1888, in the town of Washburn, Ohio, three children are born within hours of one another -- Robert Butler, Lily Scofield, and Lily's first cousin, Warren -- and they are nearly inseparable from birth. When Robert and Lily marry, Lily feels assured that she will always have as her own the two people she has most loved all her life. The charmed circle Lily has long imagined is threatened when Agnes Claytor, a young woman from another prominent Washburn family, falls in love with Warren Scofield -- disrupting not only life within the Scofield and Claytor families but in the small town of Washburn itself.

At its heart, The Evidence Against Her is about romance -- the romance of the close ties of childhood, the romance of new love, of ambition, and of family myth. Robb Forman Dew traces the evolution of an American family from its inception, with the gradual confluence through marriage of the Scofields, the Butlers, and the Claytors. Although it is the women of these families who bear the brunt of the responsibility for family happiness, the her of the title is as slippery and hard to pin down as the evidence itself.

The Evidence Against Her is about the persistently human pursuit of happiness even in the face of all the evidence that it may not be achieved. Robb Forman Dew paints her largest canvas thus far, offering readers a whole world to inhabit, remember, and wonder about long after the book is finished. This is a tender, luminous story that read-. ers will ache to follow into the next generation.