The Hike centers on four friends who go on a trip together every year, with each friend taking a turn choosing where they go. And yet again, I was thrilled to find that The Hike somehow managed to live up to all of my rather high expectations. Each of the four friends at the center of this novel is thoughtfully crafted, with unique traits and viewpoints that made it easy to differentiate among them.

When the women arrive in Norway laden down with their hiking gear, each is anxious for different reasons, no less the fact none of them have ever hiked in their lives. The one thing that kept her inspired and motivated was that she had the beach hut and could work on the drizzly and cold days looking out at the sea. I spent five days hiking in Norway, experiencing first-hand the fear that grips you when fog rolls in and the visibility is reduced to almost nothing, or the difficulty of making a river-crossing wearing a cumbersome backpack.You might catch me on an early morning walk/jog with my pup once in a while, but out in the wilderness, no thanks.

All that said, I enjoyed this book overall and will definitely check out this author’s previous work. In each book I’ve read by Clarke, I’ve always been particularly blown away by her deft ability to build consistent and ever ratcheting suspense. Dragging along the others, they head out for four days in the remote wilderness with just each other and their minimal experience. British author Lucy Clarke gifts her audience with a brand-new wilderness thriller, set in the beautiful but dangerous surrounds of Norway. I actually started out reading The Hike before I switched to the audio, and I would recommend it either way!Wanted to get this one off while it was fresh in my mind and before I passed out from the meat sweats.

If I had to rank them from most to least likeable, I'd say: Maggie (hella wholesome), Helena (she got a huge character arc which was great to see), Liz (very type A, forced the women into a dangerous trip because SHE needed it, didn't Liz decided she was ready to do something different, so when she told her friends about a four-day adventure of wild hiking and camping in Norway they wondered if she was serious. By this time, she already knew that she wanted to become a fiction author but needed money to support herself. The mistakes are wide ranging, from crass stupidity to thoughtlessness and so things that could go wrong, certainly do. Seeking the escape of a lifetime, four friends hike out into the beautiful Norwegian wild - nothing between them and the mountain peak but forest, sea and sharp blue sky.

And why do they keep seeing people from the small Norwegian town on the mountain after they've been told there's a storm?