Trust Fall, by Lynn Painter | Free Audiobook
An inheritance, a school she cannot afford to fail, and a tutor with a grudge
Julia's life in Nebraska is small and entirely satisfactory, which is why the death of the elderly neighbour next door turns it upside down: he was richer than anyone knew, and he left the whole of it to her family. The money moves them to a brownstone in the city and into a school where the other pupils have had this life for generations, and where Julia, who is clever and out of her depth, is quietly drowning.
Help arrives in the form of Damion, hired to get her grades back on track, who is charming and rebellious and there for a reason he does not disclose. Damion is the dead man's great-nephew, he does not believe his relative meant to leave his house to people he had just met, and he has decided that the fastest way to the truth is to get close to Julia without her noticing why. The novel alternates between the two of them, which means the listener knows about the deception from the beginning and spends every early scene watching the plan work too well.
It is a romantic comedy read by Saylor Bell Curda and Aidan Bissett, running eleven hours and thirty-seven minutes, released September 29, 2026.
Lynn Painter's reputation rests on the fact that she writes teenagers who sound like people rather than like a genre, and this one continues that: Julia is genuinely disoriented by money in a way that is funny without ever being a joke at her expense, and Damion's plan is exactly the kind of scheme a clever, resentful boy would convince himself was reasonable. The dual narration is the right choice for it, partly because Damion is the more interesting voice and partly because his chapters let the listener see the moment the con stops being a con, which is the engine of every book like this.
The banter is the part the reviews are unanimous about, and it holds up over eleven hours because the two narrators are clearly playing off each other rather than alternating readings. Saylor Bell Curda keeps Julia's warmth and her stubbornness in the same register, and Aidan Bissett gives Damion the self-aware swagger the character needs to stay likeable while he is lying to someone who trusts him. Listeners who came for the autumn atmosphere, the private-school absurdity and the enemies-to-trust arc generally report that they got it and read it in two days, and several who had cooled on the author's recent work say this one is a return to form.
What keeps it from being a favourite for the listeners who liked it least is mostly pace, and this is the complaint to take seriously for the audio. One describes the book as starting slowly and takes a while to warm to Julia, though Damion won them over; another calls the whole thing cute, sweet and easy to read but slightly forgettable and pretty predictable, and mentions more profanity than they wanted in what is otherwise a gentle story. The most concrete objection is that the balance between interior reflection and things actually happening tilts too far towards the inside of the characters' heads, with chapters where the plot barely moves, and that listener notes drily that their estimated time to finish kept going up. Over eleven and a half hours of audio that ratio matters more than it does on paper, because a chapter of thinking takes as long to hear as a chapter of arguing.
My own view is that the weakness is structural rather than a failure of writing: the deception gives the middle of the book almost nothing to do, since the listener already knows the secret and Julia cannot find it out yet, and the novel fills that space with atmosphere and feeling, which is pleasant but not tense. It is a strong comfort listen, and it is not a book that will keep you up to find out what happens next, because you can see what happens next.
Content notes: this is young-adult material with a romance that stays within that register, some drinking at parties and a family grieving offstage, and no graphic content. Eleven and a half hours. For listeners who want the same appetite, the site's The Night We Met and In a Holidaze are both here and both operate on the same fuel.
Trust Fall is Lynn Painter's rags-to-riches romantic comedy: Julia inherits a stranger's fortune, moves to New York and an elite school where she is failing, and hires a tutor whose motives are not what they appear. It is narrated in two voices by Saylor Bell Curda and Aidan Bissett, runs 11 hrs and 37 mins unabridged, and was released on September 29, 2026.
The story is a dual point of view, which suits the audio because the listener learns Damion's secret early and spends the first half watching him try to have it both ways. Eleven and a half hours is a weekend or a fortnight of driving, and it is the kind of book that works best in long stretches rather than in fragments.
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