In the remote Rocky Mountains, lives depend on the Search & Rescue brotherhood. But in a place this far off the map, trust is hard to come by and secrets can be murder…
As the captain of Field County’s ice rescue dive team, Callum Cook is driven to perfection. But when he meets new diver Louise “Lou” Sparks, all that hard-won order is obliterated in an instant. Lou is a hurricane. A … hurricane. A walking disaster. And with her, he’s never felt more alive…even if keeping her safe may just kill him.
Lou’s new to the Rockies, intent on escaping her controlling ex, and she’s determined to make it on her own terms…no matter how tempting Callum may be. But when a routine training exercise unearths a body, Lou and Callum find themselves thrust into a deadly game of cat and mouse with a killer who will stop at nothing to silence Lou-and prove that not even her new Search and Rescue family can keep her safe forever.
Search and Rescue:
On His Watch (novella)
Hold Your Breath
Fan the Flames
Gone too Deep
In Safe Hands
more
I loved this book for the suspense and the growing romance. But seriously, the suspense and the mystery is what sucked me in, held me by the throat, and convinced me to click buy on book 2 in the series. Ruggle writes compelling stories. There is a mystery slowly unfolding over the course of the series, but there is a secondary threat/suspense line for each individual book as well.
In book one we meet Lou and Callum of the rescue dive team. Lou is a hoot! She says what she wants and has a tendency to find trouble. I mean, come on, she’s practicing dive and rescue techniques when she kicks a headless body in the frozen lake! She’s fairly new to the Colorado town, having finally left home and the controlling parents and ex-fiance. She’d determined to stand on her own two feet and make her own choices. She’ll learn that letting the dive team become her new family, who has her back, is invaluable.
Callum is the quiet brooding type, but even he can’t resist Lou’s crazy energy. He’s drawn to her and wants to make sure she stays safe at all costs. They just have to survive the line up of bad guys lurking in the shadows. (Having read the next two books, I’m going to stop there because I don’t want to let any spoilers slip!)
I love this series! The characters are well developed and have their own quirky personalities! Hold Your Breath with Callum and Lou will just hook you right in plus its romantic suspense with an overarching plot that slowly gets solved with each book but doesn’t have a cliffhanger for the individual mini plots and romantic storyline. An A+ for me!
This is one of the best suspense romance I’ve ever read . It’s definitely Intriguing and action packed and so Suspenseful then you throw in Lous quirky humor . The characters are all out fantastic . This story will definitely hold your attention . Lou walked away from her old life of being controlled by her parents and her ex . Moving to the Rockies and joining the Search and Rescue team . She’s fighting an attraction to Callum Cook the Ice dive Captain . During a training exercise Lou discovers a dead body and soon Lou is in danger . Callum steps in to help her figure out who is the killer and keep Lou safe . Lou and Callum find themselves fighting for their lives . I absolutely loved this story. This is book one of the Search and Rescue Series . I highly recommend reading this story .
4.5 stars
As always tends to happen when I have a book from the brick and mortar library and not on my Kindle, this book has been sitting around waiting for me to pick it up for a while. Not only do I not get a back-light when reading a paperback, I also now have to wear reading glasses when it’s such small print. I do so much of my reading in bed that it makes it much harder to be motivated to pick up a paperback over my Kindle Paperwhite. Then, when it’s a book by an author I love, I wonder why I waited so long. This book was so exciting and fast-paced, I couldn’t put it down!
The romance between Lou and Callum is a slow build. There’s a bit of will they or won’t they and when will it happen. There’s a lot of chemistry, but they both have their reasons for holding back. It’s sweet and passionate and touching. I couldn’t get enough of the scenes these two shared. On top of that, there is great friend/buddy chemistry between Lou and Derek and some of the other first responders in the area. They all look out for each other like family, and Lou is no exception.
I would have liked a bit more fleshing out of both Lou’s and Callum’s childhoods, especially Callum’s. But, to be frank, the story held up even without a deep dive.
Like I said, this story is unputdownable. I laughed and smiled a lot. I also yelled out loud and did a lot of gasping. Good thing I was reading at home so I was only annoying my husband with my spontaneous noises. There are some tense situations. There are plenty of shady characters. There are things you see coming and things you do not know are going to happen. One of the main plot points is wrapped up by the end, another is not. It’s going to be fun following that lead into the next story. I’ll just have to remember to have nothing on my calendar for the day when I read the next story.
This review can also be found at https://allingoodtimeblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/hold-your-breath-search-and-rescue/
This book had the best banter – truly hysterical – and it wasn’t even between the hero and the female main character, it was her and her team-mates (mostly). I remember being really impressed! Was a great read – love the characters – she pats her truck, people – come on, you have to love that! Oh, and the hero? Yeah. I’ll take one of those. The romance was spot-on, and I learned a lot about cold weather search and rescue, too. Well done!
I totally love all the books in the series. I would highly recommend them.
Wow this book was action packed. I really loved both Lou and Callum. They were so opposite it was funny. Callum was super structured, OCD, and very serious. Lou was funny as hell, playful, sassy, energetic, and chaotic. Them together was so much fun. It was like a chihuahua picking on a big grumpy bear. Even though there was a lot of action in this book there are a ton of funny moments too. I laughed a lot while reading this book.
Callum and Lou’s relationship was a sweet slow burn. Even though I really loved Callum, Lou really made this book for me. Her personality was really fun to read. I liked Rob, Chris, and Ian and can’t wait to get to know them more. I missed my George in this book. But I guess he can’t be the star of all the books. Hold Your Breath was a great read, but it ends in a cliffy. Not a painful omg how will I live cliffy but I am glad that the other book is already out so I don’t have to wait to see what is up with Ian!
Loved this entire series. Can’t wait to read more from Katie Ruggle
I received a copy of Hold Your Breath from the publisher via Edelweiss+ in exchange for an honest review. The following review is comprised of my opinions and mine alone.
While I was reading Hold Your Breath, I was repeatedly reminded of one of my favourite romance novel couples, Blayne Thorpe and Bo Novikov from Shelly Laurenston’s Beast Behaving Badly. Needless to say, Callum Cook and Lou Sparks have now joined the ranks of my favourite romance couples and I’ll be rereading Hold Your Breath a thousand times and randomly quoting parts of it in the middle of conversations much to my friends and family’s dismay. What can I say, I’m a weird potato.
Louise ‘Lou’ Sparks is the boisterous, goofy, and messy leady lady I love. She’s the type of woman who will trip over thin air and everybody in the tricounty area will witness it. But she’s also the woman who will teach herself to fix a propane heater the first time it breaks rather than cry about and spend the money she doesn’t have to call in a repairman to do the job for her every time it breaks. She’s just recently moved to Simpson, Colorado to become a person she’ll like seeing in the mirror (a thing I can totally get behind) and she’s working as the new waitress in the local cafe to make an honest paycheck. She’s also just joined Simpson’s volunteer Search & Rescue Dive Team – for anybody who doesn’t know, that means she’s diving into freezing cold water and swimming under the ice looking for whatever brain trust decided it’d be a good idea to take a stroll on the not-as-thick-as-they-thought-it-was ice. Lou’s pretty hardcore doing that but she’s also the spazz that has a slap fight with her buddy over some random thing.
Callum Cook is a retired Marine (because there’s no such thing as a ‘former’ Marine) and the leader of Simpson, Colorado’s Search & Rescue Dive Team – and Lou’s boss/trainer. He comes off as a bit of a stick-up-his-butt sort thanks to his OCD ways but he’s pretty great to me. He’s the perfect yin to Lou’s yang. Where Lou is outgoing and really friendly to absolutely everybody, Callum plays it more close to the vest, he’s cordial to everybody and he’s friendly to the search & rescue community but he keeps himself apart from his team since he’s the boss. Lou brings him out of his shell the more they’re together and he brings a bit of needed organisation to her life as well. He has moments where he’s “me Tarzan, you Jane” around her male friends but I think he’s pretty 21st century about his relationship with Lou overall – and I’ll admit, even I like a bit of the Tarzan attitude.
As always, Ms Ruggle’s romantic suspense kept me teetering on the edge of my seat, erm, bed, I’m a total bed reader. I was freaking the freak out with Lou’s stalker just standing there watching her sleep right outside her window. I had to hide under Manatee the Service Dog’s head at one point but I kept reading because I had to see what happened! I almost started chewing on Manny’s nails (mine are kept non-existent for a reason!) at a certain point you’ll recognise it when you get to it (did you honestly think I’d write a spoiler?!). Poor Manny didn’t get much sleep during this book’s read time, y’all. I ended up giving him a salmon skin rollup as an apology after I was finished the book.
One of my favourite things of Ms Ruggle’s writing is always her humour. In Hold Your Breath, it’s evident immediately in how Lou and Callum are introduced – there’s an actual slap fight involved. We also have uncle brothers – I thought those were only a South Georgia thing, honestly. And we had mocking of Big Bads, I can always get behind Big Bad mocking. It’s a favourite pastime of mine.
Now, the chemistry between Callum and Lou. I love love LOVE it. It’s dorky and weebly wobbly, is it there or not? But it’s also blatant and everybody and their neighbour knows it’s there, how can you not notice it? Between Lou’s messiness that invades every space that is hers at work or at home and Callum’s OCD proclivities that leave him absolutely horrified at the sight of her work locker let alone her living room, you just have to read the entire book to watch how the two manage to blend their personalities together. I have good reason to believe that the white board comes into play a lot more often than just for Lou’s weird obsession with HDG.
As for the whodunnits and whatsits. I thought I knew who the stalker was and then I was thrown for a loop then a loopdiloop! So I really and truly loved Ms Ruggle’s Hold Your Breath for managing to surprise me not just once but TWICE in my reading. I thought I was wrapping up the story after everything was over and she threw in that curveball and wham I didn’t know what to think! She is a constant font of surprises with every book I read. As always, you can tell that Ms Ruggle has put a lot of research into her writing. I actually found myself looking a few things up because I actually didn’t know a thing or two which isn’t very often in my world. I will always take the time to read a Katie Ruggle original just for that reason alone!
Hold Your Breath gets 5 out of 5 stars from me and just 3 out of 5 flames for spiciness. I look forward to reading the rest of this series which I’ll also be reviewing, I can’t wait to see who else from Simpson, Colorado gets bitten Ms Ruggle’s Love Bug and how their stories play out as always. I’ll be sure to let y’all know!
This is the second book that I have read by author Katie Ruggle. As with the first, I am not disappointed. The story has non-stop action with several twists. The heroine is spunky, sassy, and absolutely adorable. The hero is a sexy alpha male that has a bit of OCD and doesn’t show his emotions. I loved that the author has written both the hero and the heroine as strong characters, equals in the who’s gonna save who moments. Even though the author left us hanging wanting, no wait, needing to know who had murdered the HDG, I found the story well written and very enjoyable. If you like to read about strong men and woman in uniform than this is a must read for you!
Loved it. I love this series.
My first Katie Ruggle novel, but not my last! Great pacing, great tension, loads of action. Not many books keep me up late at night…this one did.
Lou leaves Connecticut and her overbearing parents and boyfriend and moves to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She is training on the Search & Rescue dive team where the divers work in freezing lakes. Because she’s the only woman on the team she has to work extra hard to get their trust. Lou was a lawyer in Connecticut but now works in a coffee shop so this is a huge change for her.
Callum is her team leader. He’s a tough and intense man with complete control over his team. Lou is quite spontaneous so his control over her actions is not easy for him. Even though Callum’s approach to everything having to be “just right” and Lou blunders through life, they are attracted to each other. In this case, opposites do attract.
While on a dive training Lou dislodges a body from under the ice. When she goes back to her truck she sees one of the tires have been slashed and this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Between Lou wanting to find out who the dead man was and having a stalker, she’s got a mess on her hands. Callum gets all alpha and won’t leave Lou, feeling she needs his protection.
Katie Ruggle is a very illustrative writer making it easy to picture the events taking place. The book is a great read and definitely captures the reader in the story line, but that wouldn’t work if she didn’t have good characters. Lou is a strong, courageous woman that comes across a bit klutzy at first. But we see that’s mainly because of her feelings for Callum which she tries to hide. Since she wants him to see her as capable, whenever she messes up, she feels it’s ten times worse than it really is. Callum is very competent and can’t abide being anything else. The differences between them was so extreme that I couldn’t picture them as a couple. He had OCD, being a clean freak and she was a total slob. I wondered how they could have feelings for each other but, obviously, attraction has nothing to do with how clean or messy someone’s house is.
If you like suspense and action with a bit of romance tossed in, you’ll like this book.