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Candle in the Darkness is the first of three books in the Refiner’s Fire series by Lynn Austin. Lynn Austin is a Christian author and has won eight Christy awards. This book is set in the era of the civil war with an interesting perceptive of a southern belle. Caroline Fletcher is the daughter of a wealthy slave-owner from Richmond, Virginia. She was raised to know that slavery was God-ordained and morally acceptable.

When Caroline was a child her mother had committed suicide. A few years later her father sent her away to her Uncle’s mansion up in Philadelphia. Her family there were not in favor of slavery and changed her view of everything. Three years later, her father brings her back home to the South. She tries to live in a world that seems so new and cruel. She now knows that slavery is wrong and that she has to do something about it, but that is hard to do when you are only a female in the south.

Caroline has a fiancé and a father that are both Confederate soldiers and her cousin that she met in the north, and writes to frequently, was fighting for the Union. But once he gets captured by the Confederate army, she figures out what to do. She visits her cousin on a daily basis in jail and brings him food and books to read, such as the famous and huge book Les Misèrables. She helps him escape with bringing him spoons in the baskets and maps of where everything is in accordance to the building. As he tries to escape he is shot and killed. Caroline is now all alone again with the exception of her still enslaved friends, and she tries to fight and change her father’s mind about slavery to save her friends.