The million or so people who read "In a Dark Garden" four years ago will be glad to know that Dr. Julian Chisholm (surgeon, Confederate States Army) got home safely after Appomattox. Home, of course, was Chisholm Hundred, a plantation in the Cape Fear valley of North Carolina. In ["The Stubborn Heart," the] sequel to his 1946 best-seller, Frank Slaughter presents his own novelized formula for peace-with-honor in the territory of the newly shattered Confederacy. It may come eighty-five years late, but it will make mighty exciting reading for Dr. Slaughter's readers, with plenty of action on and off the operating table….

In the course of his hero's struggle, Dr. Slaughter also finds time for a spine-chilling chase over quicksands in Twelve-Mile-Hammock, vignettes of carpetbag ridden Wilmington and Radical-dominated Washington, saturnalia in a scalawag heaven and the difficulties a Tidewater aristocrat must face in settling down with a wife...