To be properly prepared, the reader should come to a Frank G. Slaughter book with clean hands—not merely washed but scrubbed in an antiseptic solution and germ-free, for this novelist insists that you spend much of your time watching operations, treating fevers and infections, reducing factures and taking notes at post-mortems. He is an excellent story-teller, interested in many phases of life and all the facets of love, but apparently he writes with a pen which is also a combination scalpel, forceps and clinical thermometer. That he is justified in this procedure would seem to be proved by his continuance in it. His stories have been about surgeons in modern war, about doctors mixed up in scandal, in hospital intrigue and in municipal politics and if you have taken the full course you have practically completed your internship….

"In a Dark Garden" is intense drama even when...