This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum Narrator: Julia Whelan, Sean Patrick Hopkins
Published by Macmillan Audio on March 10, 2026
Source: NetGalley
Genres: Fiction, Romance, Thriller
Length: 10 hrs 39 mins
Pages: 368
Format: Audiobook
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Benny Abbott and Joy Moore host one of the most beloved podcasts in the world. Each week, they delight listeners with a different “against all odds” survival story, gleefully finding the weird, life-affirming humor in near-death experiences. Since their first episode on Joy’s experience with severe narcolepsy, they’ve been the best friends everyone wants to befriend—and thanks to the meticulous management of Joy’s husband, Xander, they’ve built a lucrative empire.
The problem is, their next survival story may be their own. When Benny arrives at Joy and Xander’s one morning to record, he finds shattered glass and an empty house. The one clue shedding light on the couple’s disappearance is the incomplete, previously unseen first draft of Joy’s memoir. Benny will stop at nothing to find them, even as the police zero in on him as their prime suspect.
Millions of devoted listeners think they know the “real” Benny and Joy. But as the hours tick by, and the odds seem increasingly stacked against Joy and Xander being found alive, not even the most devoted fans could guess the terrible secrets their favorite famous BFFs have hidden from the world—and from each other.
This Story Might Save Your Life is part mystery, part thriller, and part romance. Best friends and podcast hosts Benny and Joy have built a career on survival stories, but now Joy has disappeared and Benny is the prime suspect.
I enjoyed about the first half of the book. The story is told through Benny’s point of view interspersed with bits from the podcast and from Joy’s chapters of an unfinished memoir. I listened to the audio book which, with its two narrators, fit this format perfectly. They did a fabulous job with banter during the podcast clips and really brought each character’s feelings and personality across.
Benny and Joy are keeping secrets, form their listeners and from each other, as are the people around them. Those are slowly revealed and there are several twists. I was enjoying it, until I found myself thinking “can we just get to the end?” I wanted to know how it all played out, but I was getting a bit board. The suspense kind of faltered. It’s character based, but at times I just wanted the plot to advance quicker. There was little doubt where it we going to end up – an ending I was pleased with by the way, it just took too long to get there. There were also a couple of times where characters/organizations did not act in a way I felt would have been reasonable.
Overall, it was good, but some people liked it better than I did. And, if you’re going to pick this up, avoid reading to many reviews. I felt like some I read before reading the book gave away too much.
About Tiffany Crum
Tiffany Crum grew up on a dairy farm just down the road from a maximum-security prison. A longtime Californian, she worked a variety of jobs in the film industry before earning her MFA in creative writing. She now lives in Atlanta with her husband, sons, and dogs, and spends her free time trying to keep her vegetable garden alive. While she enjoys all genres, her favorite books will always be those that combine big twists with big heart.
Her debut novel, THIS STORY MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE, is forthcoming on March 10, 2026 from Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar. A BBC Radio 2 Book Club selection, it has sold in fifteen languages, and is under option for TV.
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