Something Wilder

Something Wilder by Christina Lauren is a standalone contemporary romance published in May 2022 by Gallery Books. Lily Wilder grew up in the shadow of her father Duke — a notorious, largely absent treasure hunter obsessed with the legend of Butch Cassidy's hidden loot along Utah's Outlaw Trail. Now twenty-nine and scraping by in Hanksville, Utah, she runs a tourist expedition company using Duke's hand-drawn, cryptic maps to lead city visitors on elaborately staged fake treasure hunts through the Canyonlands. It's not glamorous work, and it doesn't pay enough to reclaim the Wyoming ranch her father sold years before his death. Then the last person she wants to see turns up in her next group of clients.

Leo Grady spent a summer working at Wilder Ranch a decade ago and left under circumstances that shattered Lily's plans for the future. The second chance romance between them is the emotional spine of the novel — two people carrying ten years of silence, misread intentions, and stubborn hurt, suddenly thrown together with nowhere to go but forward. Forced proximity takes on a literal edge here: they're on horseback in the desert, sharing the same campfire, deciphering the same clues. Lily's guarded protagonist energy is earned rather than performed. Leo's quiet persistence never tips into pushiness. The witty banter and sharp dialogue the duo is known for is very much present, balanced against something rawer than their earlier work.

The novel shifts gear decisively around its midpoint. What begins as a staged excursion becomes a genuine hunt when clues surface suggesting Duke may have actually located Cassidy's fortune. The hidden truths surrounding Duke's legacy — and what he left behind for Lily — propel the plot into adventure-thriller territory, with dark secrets, double-crosses, and escalating stakes forcing the group to reckon with who among them can be trusted. Reviewers have noted it reads with a cinematic quality, closer in tone to an action-adventure film than a conventional rom-com, with high-stakes survival sequences that feel genuinely tense against the sweltering Utah landscape.

The close-knit friend group dynamic adds warmth and comic texture — Leo's friends arrive expecting a lads' holiday and end up considerably out of their depth — while Lily's best friend serves as a fierce, loyally badass heroine in her own right. The family legacy thread running beneath the romance gives the book more weight than its premise might suggest. Duke Wilder's absence shaped Lily in ways she's still cataloguing, and the treasure hunt becomes, quietly, a way of reckoning with that. The Lawless Frontier setting isn't just backdrop — the Outlaw Trail's history of outlaws and hidden caches is woven into the novel's DNA, giving the whole thing an appropriately sun-bleached, wide-open atmosphere.

Described by the authors themselves as inspired by the film Romancing the Stone, Something Wilder is a departure from Christina Lauren's more purely comedic earlier work — darker in places, more action-driven, and unafraid of emotional angst. Starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist praised it as essential reading for fans of romantic adventure, and it earned endorsements from authors including Jodi Picoult. If you come for the slow-burn romance, you'll stay for the canyon.