In the Cool of the Evening

In the Cool of the Evening is a romance novel by the American writer Janet Spaeth, published in 2010 by Heartsong Presents, the Christian romance line of Barbour Publishing.

Ric Jensen is a youth minister in a small town in North Dakota that has been nearly wiped out by flooding, and he has decided to do something practical about it by opening a daycare in the church to let parents return to work. The work is harder than he expected, and when he meets Lily Chamberlain and her son at a retreat he takes her for the answer to his problem. Lily and Todd have their own losses and their own reasons for being cautious, which is the obstacle the novel works with, and the two of them have to decide whether the town and the man offering them a place are where they belong. Spaeth writes for the Heartsong programme, and the setting, the congregation and the small-town recovery are as much of the book as the courtship.

Heartsong Presents published short inspirational romances in large numbers, usually set in ordinary American communities, and this one belongs to the same programme as the other titles in this batch.