["In a Dark Garden"] turns back into nineteenth-century history, to deal with a young Confederate field surgeon: an elaborately romantic tale, it details a smashing series of victories he wins with his scalpel for both sides during the Civil War. First and last a doctor, Julian Chisholm (of the Cape Fear Chisholms) serves the Confederacy out of quixotic chivalry. He defies high brass, rides hell-for-leather with the cavalry, performs prodigies of delicate surgery in a mine crater at Vicksburg, aboard a Nassau-bound clipper in a roaring gale, under snipers' rifles at Chickamauga….

The theme of the doctor's dilemma in wartime is one which [Frank G. Slaughter] (who served in the Medical Corps during the recent global conflict) is eminently fitted to handle. This is his sixth novel, and his first in the field of historical romance: this time, his crusading young doctor is trapped by both his milieu...