Before the frenzied modern era of superhighways, television, and the internet, American life was lived in small towns, in places where families knew every neighbor; where the bonds of love and hatred, friendship and feud, were tightly woven across generations. In such a town lived Robert Wheelock. He was soft-spoken, intelligent, Harvard-educated, and seemingly destined from birth for great things. His father, the county judge and owner of the local railroad and electric company, was wealthy and respected. So Robert’s own success appeared assured … until the judge’s sudden death dealt a blow to his expectations. In this kaleidoscopic book spanning three decades of American life, Robert Wheelock falls in love with his beautiful cousin and takes on his first clients as a lawyer with his own practice. He fights a series of bitter skirmishes with his stepmother, suffers personal tragedy and loss, and starts down the path of public life and civic duty first blazed by the judge. And then Robert commits an indiscretion that will haunt him for twenty years—an indiscretion that will jeopardize his marriage and his place in the community. The Judge’s Daughter is the story of a man’s conscience and his capacity for love, set in a time and place that will never exist again, but that will live forever in the American imagination.
