Review: "Take a Hike" by Katie Ruggle

Take a Hike by Katie Ruggle
Published November 2025 via Sourcebooks Casablanca
★★★

We're into book 3 of this series, and I think it might actually be the end of it because all of the sisters seem to have found "their men", so there's nobody left to marry off. A spinoff is possible, but in the meantime...some observations.

– Neither the cover nor the title has the slightest thing to do with the book. Neither, for that matter, does the tagline on the cover ("Why date a mountain man? Because it's effing in-tents"). I doubt the author had anything to do with the cover, or the tagline, but I'm sorely disappointed with the publisher.

– Spoiler warning for this point: This book has some of the worst insta-love I've read in years. The book takes place over roughly four days. Charlie and Kieran are engaged within that time. They're married a month later. End spoilers

– Kieran does get two minutes of character development in which he tells Charlie that she can't possibly love him—not because they've known each other for less than a week, mind, but because nobody has ever loved him before. This is solved by Charlie telling him that he's lovable and hot, and then it's never mentioned again.

– Here is the sum total of Kieran's personality: big. muscular. firefighter. taciturn. protective. big.

– At one point Kieran tells Charlie that he's required to get regular STI tests for work...as a firefighter. This...sounds like horseshit to me, unless he also dresses as a firefighter for some kind of undisclosed side gig. (HIV testing after an accidental needle-stick, sure, but routinely?)

– I'm starting to think that none of Ruggle's heroes are actually fluent in English. And that would be fine, if I thought they were fluent in another language...but they communicate mostly in grunts, grumbles, and scowls, and I'm no longer certain. (Charlie, just like her sisters, finds this entirely adorable; it does not concern her that she learns almost nothing about Kieran that cannot be communicated in a grunt.) The men also pout a lot (except it's not described as pouting, it's described as looking "a bit grumpy") whenever the women mention any other man being hot (which they do a lot; nobody in this series is deep).

– The thread that holds this series together is about Charlie and her sisters' mother, who has stolen a necklace and skipped out on bail, but that is very very very much an afterthought in this book, and in the series more generally.

– In this small town, the coffee order for the fire station includes eight full drink carriers, each of which I assume holds four drinks. Am I to understand that they have thirty-two firefighters on duty at one time? In their wee little town?

– So many reminders of how big and muscle-y the various romantic leads from this series (and related series) are. So many. Meanwhile, the baddies are all either 1) kind of weeny or 2) possibly fat. So I'm left with the impression that you can only be a hero if you're swole in an everyone-thinks-he-takes-steroids-but-actually-he's-just-that-hot kind of way, and if you aren't a muscle man, you're lazy and a possible villain.

So there we are. I gave the book three stars because it's playful, but I think my initial enthusiasm for this series has long since run out. Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more on a different day, but I think I needed a bit more realism somewhere—if not in the bounty hunting and constant running from explosions and bullets and so on, then in the relationship. And this kind of insta-love just doesn't give me that.

Counts:
growl: 20
grumble, grumbling, grumbly: 29
grump, grumpy, grumped: 6
grunt: 30
rumble: 5
scowl: 50
surly: 8