Before You Press Play
- Narrator: A single credited reader, Erin Mallon, carrying two opposed first-person voices across a dual point-of-view novel.
- Subjects: Grumpy boss and sunshine employee, enemies to lovers, caregiving and financial precarity, workplace power
- Tone: Sharp-tongued and warm, heavier than the cover admits
- Bottom line: One of the strongest grumpy-boss romances going, as long as you want the hard storylines that come with it.
Lucy Score wrote a workplace comedy with a spine of real hardship running through it, and knowing that in advance is the difference between a satisfying listen and an ambushed one. The packaging sells grumpy boss, sunshine employee, fashion magazine, banter. All of that is present and delivered with considerable skill across fourteen hours. Underneath it, though, this audiobook carries a caregiving storyline, a harassment storyline and a heroine whose financial situation is genuinely precarious rather than comically so. Readers who arrived expecting froth have said as much, and the mismatch is worth understanding before you press play.
The best account of how this book finds its readers comes from one who explains discovering it through a screenshot of a one-star review, circulated in a recommendation group, complaining about the sheer quantity of explicit content. That complaint read as an endorsement, and the purchase followed immediately. Romance readers have long used negative reviews as a targeting system, since the thing one reader flags as a defect is precisely what another is searching for, and few books demonstrate the mechanism as neatly. The heat level is not incidental here; it is the product.
Score's construction is smarter than the premise admits. Dominic Russo gets Ally Morales fired from a restaurant job during a bad day, then discovers his mother has hired her into the magazine he runs, which is a farce setup. What the book does with it is not farcical at all. He is determined not to become the second Russo man to abuse his position, having watched his father do exactly that, and his refusal to act on attraction is characterized as ethics rather than as reluctance. That distinction carries the whole enemies-to-lovers structure.
Ally is the sharper creation of the two, and readers respond to her accordingly. She holds down several jobs while concealing exactly why, navigating personal and financial crises that would level most people, and the book lets her be funny about it without ever minimizing what it costs. The nicknames the two trade, Charming and Maleficent, appear in the written column often enough to have become how readers refer to them, and they capture the register: hostile, affectionate, and unwilling to admit which is which.
What Stands Out
Score has built the kind of reliability that turns readers into completists, and one account puts it plainly: picking up a Lucy Score novel is the way to be sure of loving a book, standalone or series alike. That same reader describes this one as funny, sizzling, heartbreaking and infuriating, a list that captures the tonal range better than any genre label. The infuriating part is not accidental either. Dominic spends a great deal of the novel being wrong in ways the reader can see and he cannot, and the book is patient about letting that play out.
Erin Mallon holds the only reading credit, which is a substantial assignment given how the novel is built. The description itself splits into two first-person sections, one headed Dominic and one headed Ally, and their voices are deliberately opposite: his clipped, self-lacerating and controlled, hers loose and combative. Single-narrator dual point of view is common in contemporary romance and it succeeds or fails entirely on whether the two registers stay separate through a scene where both characters are present. Run the sample twice, once on each.
Things to Know Before Starting By a Thread
One four-star reader does buyers a genuine service by opening with a content list the marketing copy omits entirely: "parent with dementia including aggressive outbursts, workplace sexual harassment/assault, absentee parent, financial/food uncertainty, and more." None of that is handled carelessly, and the emotional weight is a large part of why the book lands. It does mean the romantic comedy framing describes the surface rather than the substance. Anyone reaching for something light after a hard week should know what is waiting underneath the banter.
Length is worth a moment's thought as well. Fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes is generous for a contemporary romance, and one reader puts the print edition at almost six hundred pages, a ratio consistent with a complete unabridged reading rather than anything trimmed. The payoff is that the slow burn genuinely burns slowly, with room for the secondary plots to develop properly. The cost is a middle stretch where the central pair circle each other at length, and a listener wanting rapid resolution will feel it.
Two smaller things sit worth knowing. The book is a standalone, confirmed by readers who describe it that way against Score's series work, so no prior reading is required despite the author's large catalog. And the written column here concerns itself almost entirely with the story rather than the recording, discussing chapters reread, epilogues appreciated and characters argued over. The star rating reflects a novel that readers love, which is useful information about the book and silent on the production.
Best Suited For
Grumpy-sunshine devotees are the obvious audience, and the author's own note names the formula without embarrassment: a steamy, swoony workplace romantic comedy with a grumpy boss determined to fix everything and a plucky heroine who begins to suspect a heart beating somewhere under the vests. Anyone who reads that description with enthusiasm is the intended buyer. Enemies-to-lovers readers who want the antagonism genuinely earned rather than performed are also well served.
A light workplace comedy with nothing heavier underneath is not what waits here, so listeners wanting pure escapism should choose differently. The explicit content is frequent and detailed, which puts closed-door romance readers firmly in the wrong place. Anyone currently caring for a parent with dementia may find those passages harder than the genre label prepared them for. For everyone else, this is a romance that has earned its fourteen hours.
A Few Questions About By a Thread
Is the By a Thread audiobook part of a series?
No, it stands alone, and it is discussed that way in contrast to the author's series titles. Nothing in the plot depends on having read anything else first, which makes this a reasonable entry point to Lucy Score if the workplace premise and the grumpy-boss dynamic appeal to you.
How explicit is the romance in this audiobook?
Considerably. The author's own note describes the book as steamy and swoony, and the heat level is central to how it is written rather than incidental to it. Listeners who prefer closed-door romance, or who plan to listen where somebody else might overhear, should choose differently.
How much of this is workplace comedy and how much is something heavier?
The comedy is real and carries most of the banter, but serious storylines run underneath it throughout, covering caregiving, financial precarity and misconduct at work. The rom-com framing describes the surface accurately and the substance only partly, which matters if you are choosing it as light listening.
Does the story get a proper ending?
Yes, and then some. One reader reports rereading the final three chapters repeatedly and specifically praises the inclusion of two epilogues, wishing more authors would do the same. Listeners who dislike abrupt romance endings will find this one generous with its resolution.
