Sydney King comes home with a career-ending injury and an ex about to marry the woman he cheated with, which is a lot to absorb inside the opening minutes of an audiobook. Twelve hours and thirty-four minutes follow, read by Lori Prince for Tantor Media and released in April 2025. Stoneport, Massachusetts, is supposed to be the reset. It is not, because the wedding turns out to be the social event of the season, and the only person in town less enthusiastic about it than Sydney is the groom's sister, newly back after buying a local inn and carrying wounds of her own.
Lori Prince Carries Twelve Hours of Two Voices
McCallan has a following, and a five-star response from May 2025 speaks from inside it, saying plainly that this is the best of the several titles that reader has worked through and describing a sweeter change in the writing. The same response credits an interesting subplot and an ending that lands, which is roughly the genre contract fulfilled. What makes it more useful than an average endorsement is that it is comparative. Someone who has read the back catalog is placing this one at the top of it, and that carries more weight than enthusiasm from a first encounter ever can.
Tantor Media put this out at twelve hours and thirty-four minutes with Lori Prince as the credited reader, and the runtime deserves a moment's thought. What this book is made of is conversation. Two women talk their way through a wedding they both resent, and the fake relationship only holds because they keep renegotiating it out loud. That places an unusual burden on a single voice: two adult women of similar age and similar register, sharing most of the runtime in dialogue with each other, where the difference between them has to stay audible without tipping into performance.
Communicative and Respectful, All the Way Through
Stoneport gets walked through in useful detail by a five-star response from January 2026, which lays out the machinery: the best friend Sydney comes home to, the ex who proposed to the woman he cheated with, and the arrangement the two women invent to make the whole wedding harder for him. That response spells the surname with one vowel changed from the way the description does, a small thing and a fair reminder that names heard aloud land differently than names read. It calls the book fun twice, which for a story about humiliation and injury is genuinely informative.
Reese is the more guarded of the two, and the reason the book has anywhere to travel. A four-star response from April 2025 names what makes it work: communicative and respectful all the way through. That is the headline of the response rather than a phrase buried inside it, and it is an unusual quality to single out in a romance. The same entry describes the contrast the novel is built on, toxic family dynamics set against families that are healthy and still have troubles of their own, and calls the trope combination catnip. The sentence beginning its assessment of what lies beneath the surface never finishes.
Two Ratings Cannot Produce a 4.6 Average
Two is the number of ratings this listing has logged, and five is the number of people who have written something on it. That deserves stating slowly. Two whole-star votes can only ever land the average on a half-point step, so up at that end the ladder runs four, four and a half, five. A displayed average of 4.6 is not a rung on it under any rounding rule, which means the tally and the written column are not describing the same group of people. Do not read that figure as a consensus. It is a number attached to a page whose visible responses are apparently not the ones being counted.
Tennis is present and deliberately not central, which a five-star response from January 2025 identifies as a strength rather than a shortfall. Written by someone recently taken with Serena Williams, it reports that the sport supplies texture without taking over, leaving the romance in the foreground where it belongs. That entry also calls this the first fake-dating setup it has found genuinely believable, the highest compliment available inside a trope that normally asks readers to suspend more than they want to. It notes as well that both leads are femme, a detail the description never mentions and that plenty of readers will want in advance.
Fake dating works here because the lie stays small and the stakes are social rather than melodramatic, and a five-star response from March 2026 is the proof: a first-time McCallan reader who finished in two days and immediately ordered three more titles. That entry also recalls watching old-school tennis, naming Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Martina, which places the sport half of the book in a particular generation. One inconsistency is worth flagging while you are here. The description calls the man a cheating ex-boyfriend in one paragraph and Sydney's former fiancé in another, and the page never settles which he was.
Low-Conflict Readers Who Want People Talking
Sports romance readers and anyone who reads for found family are the ones this rewards most, since the tennis career functions as backstory rather than plot and the emotional work concerns two people rebuilding after separate humiliations. Listeners who want a low-conflict romance where the leads talk to each other instead of around each other should move it up the list, because low-conflict is the register the whole book operates in. And at twelve and a half hours it is substantial without becoming a commitment, which suits a genre most people read in runs rather than one at a time.
Cynics about fake dating will find this a fairer test than most, though if the trope itself is the objection, twelve and a half hours will not convert anybody. Anyone hoping for a sports novel should note that the tennis is kept at the edges on purpose. Readers who want detailed content guidance get exactly one line, contains mature themes, and nothing more specific anywhere on the page. Shoppers relying on the star average should treat the number here as unreliable for the arithmetic reasons above, and read the written column instead.
- Narration: Lori Prince is the only reader credited on a book spending most of twelve and a half hours in dialogue between two women of similar age and register.
- Themes: Fake dating, a career ended by injury, a wedding nobody wants, family loyalty pulled in two directions.
- Mood: Low-conflict and talky, warmer than the setup leads you to expect.
- Verdict: A believable fake-relationship romance let down only by a star average the arithmetic will not support.
Good to Know
How many hours is The Love Lie?
Twelve hours and thirty-four minutes, read by Lori Prince and released by Tantor Media on April 8, 2025. That sits at the longer end for a contemporary romance, which suits a book built mostly out of conversation between its two leads rather than out of incident.
Is The Love Lie part of a series?
Nothing is recorded in the series fields, and the description presents a self-contained plot with its own setting and supporting players. Nothing in the copy points backward to earlier books or forward to a sequel, so it works as a standalone entry point to this author.
Why does the audiobook show 4.6 stars from only two ratings?
That combination is not arithmetically possible. Two whole-star votes can only average to a half-point value such as 4.0, 4.5 or 5.0. Five people have written responses while the tally records two, so the displayed average and the visible column are not measuring the same pool.
How explicit is this audiobook?
The description offers a single line, contains mature themes, and provides nothing more specific. No content warning list appears anywhere on the page. Readers who screen for particular material will need to look outside the listing, since the publisher's copy declines to itemize anything.
