What if William Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him? And, if he didn't write them, why was the true author's name deleted from the greatest plays ever written in the English language? "He didn't write them you know," a Smithsonian researcher I was dating looked across the restaurant table and flatly stated. "What do you mean, he didn't write them? Of course he wrote them." "Believe what you want to believe," she said, adjusting her napkin in her lap. "If you want to stay naive, that's entirely up to you." True or false, fact or rumor, the case against Shakespeare as the playwright had apparently convinced one bright Smithsonian researcher that the true authorship lay in another direction. I had always wanted to write a historical novel. Skeptical or not, maybe this was the time and this was the subject. Body of Evidence is the story that led me to England on the adventure of a lifetime."