Tough Luck Hero
Copper Ridge, Book 5

I Picked Up This Book Because: Bookspin Bingo pick. (O5 An ARC)

Media Type: Audiobook
Source: Everand (Have Netgalley Copy)
Dates Read: 2/14/25 - 2/17/25
Rating: 3 Stars
Narrator(s): Lillian Thayer


The Characters:

Lydia Carpenter:
Colton West:
Other residents of Copper Ridge

The Story:

A very “meh” story with a hallmark ending. Perhaps I'm impatient but some plot points took way too long to drop. I wanted to understand the characters but couldn't because of things being held back.

One of my first Maisey Yates books but definitely won’t be the last. She opened up a whole new world for me to cowboy romance. Great characters, interesting plot and a setting I can picture in my mind. I loved it.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to review this book and to be an early reader via NetGalley! However, I will not be writing a review for this title at this time, as my reading preferences have since changed somewhat. In the event that I decide to review the book in the future, I will make sure to purchase a copy for myself or borrow it from a library. Once again, thank you so much for providing me with early access to this title. I truly appreciate it. Please feel free to contact me with any follow-up questions or concerns.

Tough Luck Hero was a truly entertaining read. Its part of the Copper Ridge series but can be read as a standalone. Having never read any of the Copper Ridge novels before now I can say that you can follow along just fine and it doesn't feel like you're missing anything.

Lydia and Colton.. what can I say. They seem like an unlikely pair but I kinda love the push pull of their relationship.

I love the writing style and humor woven into the book.

Overall a pretty good read I'd totally recommend!

The Story in 4 Sentences or Less: After Colton West gets left at the alter he escapes on a flight to Las Vegas with the woman who drives him nuts, prospective mayor Lydia Carpenter but things get even nuttier when Colton wakes up married to Lydia! Since Lydia is running for mayor, she can’t risk a scandalous divorce so she suggests that they play nice in public and stay married for the time being. Which has its own set of complications as Colton can’t stop thinking about making the marriage permanent and real in every way.





Like It? Hate it? Love it? Why? Maisey Yates does a fabulous job of writing enemies-to-lovers romances, there’s so much delicious tension between Colton and Lydia that I just knew they wouldn’t be able to keep their hands to themselves for long. There was some definite emotional chemistry too. The circumstances forced them into proximity with each other and they had no choice but to really get to know each other and I loved how Colton and Lydia peeled back layers of personal shields to the core of who they were making them both more vulnerable.


Colton is used to having to take charge and take care of problems for his family and sometimes that could make him a bit of a steamroller kind of guy but not with Lydia. She had her own ideas and was more than capable of going head to head with Colton. They made a good couple for the most part. My only gripe was Lydia’s uncompromising stubbornness about falling for Colton, granted it came from a real fear but she just wouldn’t budge an inch until it was almost too late. Of the two characters I liked Colton better. Poor guy is such a caretaker that he had to learn to let people take care of themselves instead and to let someone take care of him for a change.

With everything going on between Colton and Lydia it’s easy to forget that Colton has siblings and both characters have friends. They’re a nosy, supportive, sometimes conflicting group but all in all I enjoyed their presence in the book.

Click It or Skip It? Click It. Yates is a splendid author who balances heat and heart so well.

Tough Luck Hero is the fifth book in the Copper Ridge series by Maisey Yates. This was a hard book to put down. There's something about Love-Hate relationships that I just can't get enough of.
There's this sizzle in those kinds of relationships, and Lydia and Colton had the sizzle in spades! If something good could come out of being left at the alter, this is the way to do it. There were moments, especially towards the end that broke my heart. My goodness, could you feel the emotion. It was painful, but when you can stir that kind of emotional reaction for a fictional character in your reader, you know you're doing something right. This isn't the first book by Maisey Yates that I've read, and it certainly won't be the last.

It seems appropriate that Miss Bates open her reviewing year with one of her favourite contemporary romance writers. Maisey Yates’s Tough Luck Hero is part of that sprawling fictional Oregon town that Yates has created around the Garretts and Wests, as well as various inter-connected denizens. Yates’s Copper Ridge tales have yet to grow stale or pale. Some are stronger than others, but each one is a necessary part of Yates’s compellingly woven whole. (Brokedown Cowboy remains Miss Bates’s unwavering favourite.) Copper Ridge is a place of mountainous and sea-set beauty, complicated family dynamics, and the small-town warp and weft of stricture and support. With every book, Copper Ridge grows, as the lonely and disparate find someone special. The road to love, commitment, and many babies, however, is fraught with Yates’s particular vision of what falling in love and committing entail: a crap-load of resistance and torment. Tough Luck Hero‘s hero, town Golden-Boy Colton West, really has had a run of terrible luck. Mayoral candidate Lydia Carpenter is sitting pretty … until Colton and sympathy shots at Ace’s bar see her luck run out too.

When the novel opens, Colton recently discovered his father cheated on his mother. As a result, he has a 30-year-old+ brother (Jack Monaghan, Bad New Cowboy‘s hero). His fiancée leaves him at the altar. To top it all off, he wakes up in Las Vegas, on what was supposed to be his wedding night, married to Natalie’s bridesmaid, Lydia Carpenter, a woman with whom he shares, at best, antagonistic dislike. As for Lydia, Yates’s wit says it all: “Whenever she was around Colton, she wanted to punch him in the face.” Colton’s face says it all about Lydia too: “His entire face felt like it had been pushed into a barrel of bees.” And those are merely a hint of how nasty these two are to each other. Miss Bates loved it!

Lydia has equal enmity and annoyance for Colton. Yet here they are: in a compromising position, in a sordid town, in a kitschy hotel room, MARRIED … and so drunk, they don’t remember getting married, or consummating said marriage. The only evidence of their night of regret and pounding headaches are a torn condom wrapper, and wild and whirling texts, with accompanying pics, of their nuptials, to near-everyone in Copper Ridge. Lydia is beside herself with worry about her mayoral run. This incident, coupled with a quickie divorce, will definitely give the edge to her rival, Richard Bailey, Colton’s absconding bride’s father! Colton, concerned about his mother’s precarious emotional health given the recent revelations of his father’s infidelity, has reason to worry his out-of-character actions may cause Gloria further distress. Lydia and Colton, “her partner in licentiousness,” snarling and bickering all the way back to Copper Ridge, agree to put up a happily-married front to their town, friends, and family.

Miss Bates thought Yates did some interesting trope-ish things in Tough Luck Cowboy. For starters, she took the “opposites-attract” trope and stood it on its head. Colton and Lydia are very much alike, and while their minds says they’re not feeling anything, in upper or nether regions, their bodies and hearts do very different things. They’re both careful planners, responsible, duty-bound, giving all to their family and adopted town, respectively. Evidence for Colton is that “he was not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy … had never set one foot out of line” And yet, his wild night of drunken married sex with Lydia says something very much to the contrary. Lydia’s response to waking up with naked-Las-Vegas Colton proves their similar personalities further:

” … I really don’t do things like this. I am not spontaneous. I am not irresponsible. I do not … sleep with men I don’t like.”

He snorted. “I don’t usually sleep with women with superiority complexes.”

This pretty much set the hilarious tone of the novel’s first half. But, as Sadie Garrett says to her best friend, “marriage with all of the annoying things like compromise, cohabitation and having to eat what he wants for dinner, without the things that make it fun? … Wow. Good luck with that.” Sadie is right, of course, because Colton and Lydia are good people. They cohabit, compromise, and become friends because they talk and, albeit, reluctantly, share what made them who they are. To their great surprise, through all the verbal “shots,” they end up friends.

Of course, the friend’s devil, licentiousness, leads Colton and Lydia a merry tune to married-friends-with-benefits. Their bodies say everything about their relationship until they wake up one day like a shipwreck’s sole survivors, afloat on a precarious emotional raft:

… she and Colton were two powerless control freaks who were truly at the mercy of the world, and everyone in it … That wedding … was like a loose thread. And they’d tugged on it and the whole damn world had started unravelling around them and now there was just no hiding the fact that they were as ragged as everyone else.

To realign their world requires more trope-twisting goodness from Yates. In a beautiful trope-reversal, Colton plays the role of “trophy husband” and Lydia submits to a magnificent heroine grovel. Miss Bates loved every reading moment of Yates’s romance novel. With her “partner in reading,” Miss Austen, she says that Yates has yet another “mind lively and at ease,” Emma.

Maisey Yates’s Tough Luck Hero is published by HQN. It was released in June of 2016 and is available at your preferred vendors. Miss Bates received an e-ARC from HQN, via Netgalley.