Mr. Wrong Number

I picked this one up because a friend kept sending me screenshots of the texts and swearing the banter was worth it. She was right about the banter. Lynn Painter published Mr. Wrong Number in 2022 with Berkley, and the paperback runs 352 pages. It was her adult debut after her young adult books, and it reads like someone let loose writing the exact rom com she wanted to read. Full spoilers here, because the whole engine of the book is a secret identity and there is no point dancing around it.

Olivia Marshall is having the kind of month that makes you want to turn off your phone. She loses her job. She finds out her boyfriend Eli has been cheating on her. Then, while burning a box of his old love letters in a small fit of closure, she accidentally sets fire to her apartment building. Not her apartment. The building. She goes from employed and housed to jobless and homeless in about a week, mostly through bad luck with a thick streak of her own chaos mixed in.

With nowhere to go, she leaves Chicago and drives to Omaha, where her older brother Jack has a spare room. Jack is steady and protective and a little exasperated by his sister, which feels like a lifelong condition. The catch is that Jack already has a roommate. Colin Beck has been Jack's best friend since they were kids, and he has treated Olivia as an annoyance for most of that time. She thinks he is arrogant and hot in the worst combination. He thinks she is a walking disaster. They are both a little right, which is what makes the roommate setup work instead of feeling forced.

Bad luck and a burned apartment

The opening chapters move fast and set the tone. Olivia is funny about her own mess without asking you to pity her. She narrates the firing, the cheating reveal, and the fire with the timing of someone telling a story at a bar, pausing for your laugh before she admits the part that stings. Eli barely appears on the page, which is smart. He is not a rival or a villain with speeches. He is just the guy who proved he could not be trusted, and Olivia's anger at him matters less than her embarrassment at having missed the signs.

Painter grew up around Omaha and sets most of her books there, and the city feels lived in rather than pasted on. Bars with sticky floors, apartments with thin walls, winter parking fights. Nothing scenic, just the background of people in their twenties figuring out rent and jobs. Olivia temps at odd gigs and tries to rebuild. Her parents hover with the particular worry of people who love a chaotic kid and have stopped expecting calm. Jack pays for things and pretends it is no big deal. Family money is not the point. Attention is. Olivia has spent years feeling like the screw-up sibling, and every visit home seems to confirm the role.

What I appreciated is that Olivia's clumsiness never tips into cartoon. She drops things, says the wrong thing at work events, texts too fast. Stephanie Klose at Library Journal argued Painter pushes the klutzy heroine bit about ten times too hard, and I get the complaint in the early chapters. There is a lot of pratfall energy. But Suzanne Krohn at Shelf Awareness read it the opposite way, as a send-up of the trope, and I landed closer to her. Olivia's mess causes real consequences. She loses a job. She pays for the fire. People get tired of cleaning up after her. The book lets her be funny without letting her off the hook.

The roommate she cannot stand

Colin is the classic controlled guy with a cracked foundation. He is a doctor, or finishing that track, buttoned up at work and loose only around Jack. Around Olivia he defaults to teasing, the old habit from when she was twelve and trailing them. Now she is grown, and the teasing has an edge neither of them wants to name. He notices her. He hates noticing her. She catches him looking and files it under hostility because that is safer.

The roommate scenes carry the middle of the book. Kitchen negotiations. Bathroom schedules. Olivia coming home late and loud. Colin cooking actual meals while Olivia burns toast. Jack watching them circle each other with the tired eyes of a man who knows exactly how this ends and cannot stop it. There is a scene where Colin patches up one of Olivia's small injuries with brisk competence while scolding her, and the scolding is so clearly worry that Olivia goes quiet. Painter is good at these beats. The attraction is physical, sure, but the turn happens in caretaking moments. Someone makes soup. Someone remembers how you take your coffee. Someone waits up.

Colin has his own damage, mostly around control. He likes plans and clean outcomes. Olivia is the opposite of a clean outcome. His resistance to her is not really about her being annoying. It is about her being unpredictable in a way that scares him. Once you see that, his early coldness reads less like cruelty and more like self defense. Not great self defense, but human.

A fair criticism, and Kirkus made this one, is that some fights peak too early while other problems melt a little fast. A couple of blowups between Olivia and Colin follow the same shape. He pulls away, she chases, they snap, they make up. By the third round I could feel the pattern. The side conflicts with her parents also resolve with a single honest conversation each, which felt quick after chapters of buildup. The book is a comedy first, so it forgives fast, but readers who want consequences to linger may feel the smoothing.

Miss Misdial and the stranger

The texting plot starts with a wrong number. Olivia gets a message meant for someone else, the kind that opens with "What are you wearing," and instead of ignoring it she answers. The stranger answers back. They fall into a flirty, funny, increasingly personal exchange. She saves him as Mr. Wrong Number. He calls her Miss Misdial. Neither knows the other's name.

These chapters are the reason the book took off. The texts are genuinely funny, full of typos and dares and escalating dares-to-be-honest. They trade terrible-day stories. They send photos that are suggestive without showing much. They confess things they would never say out loud. Olivia tells the stranger about the fire and the shame underneath the jokes. The stranger admits he is stuck on someone right in front of him and handling it badly. Readers know before Olivia does that the stranger is Colin, typing from the next room, and the dramatic irony does all the work. Every sweet message lands twice, once as romance and once as dread, because you know the reveal will hurt.

Painter writes the two voices well. Text Olivia is bolder than spoken Olivia, quicker to ask for what she wants. Text Colin is softer than roommate Colin, willing to be uncertain. The gap between the versions is the point. Phones let them skip the old roles. Brother's best friend and annoying little sister do not exist in the chat. Two tired adults who like each other's jokes do.

One note on heat. This is an adult book with open door scenes and a lot of sexting, much spicier than Better Than the Movies. Nothing extreme by the standards of the genre, but it is explicit about desire and bodies. If you hand Painter to a teen reader, this is not the one. Start with the young adult titles.

The secret Colin keeps

Colin figures out her identity first. He realizes Miss Misdial is Olivia, and instead of telling her, he pulls back. He cools the texts. He dodges. His reasoning is a tangle of decent and cowardly motives. He does not want her to feel tricked. He does not want Jack to kill him. He does not want to admit that the woman who drives him crazy in the kitchen is the same one he waits to hear from at midnight. So he stalls, and the stall becomes its own lie.

This is the stretch where your sympathy for Colin will be tested. Mine wobbled. Ghosting someone to protect them is still ghosting, and Olivia feels the silence exactly the way a person would. She mopes. She rereads old messages. She wonders what she said wrong. Watching her shrink while Colin watches her shrink, knowing he could fix it with one sentence, is frustrating on purpose. Painter wants you mad at him here. The book needs the anger so the apology has weight.

The reveal itself lands in a messy, believable way rather than a stagey one. No grand public scene. Just the pieces clicking for Olivia at the worst moment, the phone and the man lining up, and the bottom dropping out. Her reaction rang true to me. She is hurt less by the secret than by what it implies. Of course the one man who seemed to want her without the baggage was the man with the most baggage about her. Of course the easy thing was a trick. Olivia's history has trained her to read every good break as a setup for a punchline, and Colin just confirmed the theory.

Jack's reaction deserves mention because brother's-best-friend books live or die on the brother. Jack is angry, then practical, then quietly on Olivia's side in a way that felt like real sibling love. He threatens Colin, because that is the job, but he also tells Olivia the truth about what he has seen. He does not pick sides so much as refuse to let either of them lie.

Olivia's work life deserves a line too, because the book ties her romantic growth to plain competence. She stops job hopping and sticks with a role that suits her people skills, showing up on time and handling customers without turning every shift into a story. Her boss notices. Her paychecks steady. It is not glamorous, and Painter does not dress it up, which is why it lands. The woman who set a building on fire in chapter one learns to lock up carefully and count the drawer, and the smallness of that victory feels bigger than any speech.

Putting it back together

The last act is grovel plus growth, in that order. Colin apologizes without excuses taking up most of the air. He names what he did, says why it was wrong, and accepts that Olivia might not come back. Importantly, he does not ask Jack or her parents to lobby for him. He shows up where she is, says the plain thing, and leaves room. Olivia, meanwhile, does the harder work of deciding what she wants apart from being wanted. She steadies her job situation. She stops performing chaos for laughs and starts catching herself before the spiral. Not a total rebuild. She is still Olivia. Just Olivia with a budget and a little more pause.

Their reunion works because it happens in person, in daylight, without phones. The banter is still there, but the lines are simpler. He teases less to wound. She jokes less to deflect. There is a wedding at the end, theirs, glimpsed as the setup for the next book, where Jack meets Hallie Piper after a one night stand and the two strike a wager about finding love. That story became The Love Wager, published by Berkley in 2023. Here it plays as a happy coda. Olivia and Colin made it. The family expands. Chaos finds a new volunteer.

Readers who dislike third act breakups should know this one follows the shape. Secret, blowup, separation, return. Painter executes it better than most because the separation is short and the characters stay in motion. Olivia does not just wait to be won. She works, she apologizes to people she snapped at, she figures out what steady looks like for her. If the pattern still bothers you, no craft will fix it. That is fair. The shape is the shape.

Who should read it

This is the book for readers who want a modern romantic comedy with real heat and jokes that land out loud. Fans of Christina Lauren or Ali Hazelwood will feel at home, and Painter's Omaha crew scratches the same itch as a favorite sitcom cast. Go in expecting mess, texts, and a slow thaw rather than a puzzle. The mystery is never who is texting. It is whether two people can stand each other in the same kitchen once the screens go dark.

A last honest word. The book is long on charm and short on surprise. You will guess every turn chapters early. Olivia repeats mistakes. Colin broods on a loop. The parents forgive fast. None of that ruined it for me, because the pages between the turns are so readable. I laughed on a plane at the wrong-number exchange about her terrible week and got looks. Then I sat with the sadder parts, the ones about being the family disappointment and wondering if love is just another accident waiting to happen, longer than I expected. That mix is Painter's gift. She writes jokes with weight under them, and the weight holds.