The Brothers Hawthorne

The Inheritance Games trilogy ended with Avery Kylie Grambs holding a fortune and a family she never expected, so The Brothers Hawthorne does the obvious and smart thing: it steps sideways and hands the spotlight to two of the four Hawthorne brothers. Nash and Xander are largely offstage, and Avery is present but not the protagonist. The book follows Jameson and Grayson across two continents and two mysteries, and it uses their separate quests to ask what a person owes the family that made them and the family they never got to know.

I liked the structure more than I expected. A lesser series would have kept milking Avery's point of view. Barnes instead splits the narrative clean, one brother per chapter, and lets each plot comment on the other. Jameson is chasing a father who appeared out of nowhere. Grayson is protecting sisters from a father who is dead. One is asked to prove himself to blood, the other to protect blood from the truth, and both end up deciding what loyalty actually means.

Two summons and a Christmas memory

The book opens on a memory. Twelve and a half years earlier, on Christmas morning, the four brothers sneak out of their rooms to find the Great Room stripped bare except for a single ornament, the start of a scavenger hunt that ends with a giant tree house their grandfather Tobias built for them. It is a warm, wistful scene, and Barnes returns to that tree house at the end, which gives the whole novel a frame.

In the present, Nash summons everyone to the family flat in London, and the announcement is that he is engaged to Libby Grambs, Avery's sister. While they are all together, Jameson is pulled aside by a man he has never met. Ian Johnstone-Jameson is Jameson's biological father, a professional poker player and a charming disaster, and he has a proposal. He wants Jameson to enter the most secretive gambling club in England and win an invitation to a game, so that Ian can win back Vantage, the ancestral family home he lost at the club's tables.

Jameson says no, mostly. Then he thinks about it. He has spent his whole life being the brother who takes the impossible dare, and Ian knows exactly which buttons to press. That is the uncomfortable heart of his plotline: he can see the manipulation and still wants to prove something to a man who abandoned him.

The Devil's Mercy

The club itself is a wonderful piece of invention. To get in, Jameson and Avery attend the opera, slip out during the second act, and ride an elevator that drops them into a tunnel, where a ten-year-old boy ferries them by boat to the entrance. Inside, the club is styled like a Roman villa and divided into five rooms named for the deadly sins. Wrath is a fighting ring. Greed is the gambling floor. Gluttony handles long-term bets, and the ledgers in the other rooms record wagers that range from the cruel to the absurd.

Members bet on events in other people's lives. Jameson finds two members who have bet that he will die before he turns thirty, and he responds by wagering that the Proprietor will choose someone other than his presumptive heir to inherit the club, then betting, out loud, that the Proprietor is dying. It is reckless in the way Jameson always is, and it is also shrewd, because it tells him who is watching him and what they want.

The club is run by the Proprietor, an unseen figure, and managed by Rohan, the Factotum and heir apparent. Rohan is the character who keeps the London plot interesting. He fights Jameson in twenty brutal rounds, wins on paper, and then takes a beating that leaves Jameson on his feet by something that looks like mercy rather than skill. Rohan is playing his own game, and the novel is careful to let the reader sense it without Jameson fully catching on.

Jameson's secret

To enter the Game, competitors have to wager something they would never want exposed, and the club keeps the secrets in boxes hidden on the grounds of Vantage. Jameson writes his down and hands it over, and the truth underneath it is the biggest reveal in the book. Alice Hawthorne, Tobias's wife, is still alive. The disclosure is disguised in the text as a small coded sentence, and when Avery sees it on the parchment she snatches it out of another player's hands and burns it, which means Avery now knows and Jameson is disqualified from the game along with her.

That is the emotional turn of the London plot. Jameson has been treating the Devil's Mercy as a puzzle to solve, and it turns out there is one secret he does not want to win with. Avery torching it is both a protective act and a declaration. She is telling him that she would rather lose a fortune than let his worst truth become currency.

Grayson in Phoenix

Grayson's half of the book runs in parallel and could not be more different in texture. He is in Arizona, quietly surveilling the twin half-sisters he learned about when he found out about his biological father, Sheffield Grayson. One of them, GiGi, has landed in jail. The other, Savannah, is cold and capable and does not trust him. Their mother, Acacia, is gracious to Grayson despite everything, and he immediately wants to protect all three of them.

The twins' father is dead, and they do not know it. Grayson believes GiGi may hold the key to a safe-deposit box holding evidence about Sheffield's plot against Avery and about his death, so he decides to help them find it and take the contents first. That is the lie at the center of his arc. He is protecting them by deceiving them, and he knows it.

Barnes does a good job of making Grayson's control read as a wound rather than a virtue. He practices knife fighting alone. He tells a girl he has a make-believe girlfriend, describing an impossible woman who is smart and unpredictable, and it is obvious he is describing his feelings for Avery in code. He is the brother raised to put family first, and the novel asks what happens when family first means doing something your family will hate you for.

The Grayson plot is also the more mundane of the two, and that is intentional. It is a financial thriller. Sheffield embezzled from his own company, Acacia's trust has been drained, and the family lawyer Kent Trowbridge, who is close to Acacia and whose son Duncan is dating Savannah, is positioned to force a marriage by controlling the money. Grayson works the problem methodically, planting a deposit with an investigator, photographing passwords, and setting a trap. It is less glamorous than a secret gambling club, but it is the most human part of the book.

The safe-deposit box and Sheffield's journal

The investigation produces two strong set pieces. The first is the bank, where Savannah tricks a clerk into revealing that Acacia is the other authorized user on the box, using a fake key Grayson swapped in and a fake identity under the name Tobias Davenport, which turns out to be the grandfather's first name and Grayson's own middle name. That small detail is a quiet gut punch. Sheffield was hiding his affairs behind Grayson's name all along, without ever claiming him.

The second is the journal. Grayson finds a puzzle box at the home of Kim Wright, Sheffield's estranged sister and the mother of Colin, the boy whose death sent Sheffield after Avery in the first place. The box opens in stages, and Grayson solves the final part alone, keeping the last key from the twins. Inside is Sheffield's coded diary, and with Nash and Xander helping, Grayson decodes it. It holds both the embezzlement records and Sheffield's private plans for revenge on Avery and his fixation on Grayson. Grayson recreates the journal so the twins get something harmless, and GiGi catches him in the act.

The fallout is the best scene in his plotline, because it costs him something real. GiGi and Savannah tell him to leave them alone. He has done the protective thing the way he was taught, efficiently and without asking, and it has earned him exactly what that approach always earns.

The Game and the tree house

Meanwhile the Game at Vantage plays out as a puzzle hunt through a historical estate. Rohan runs it. Competitors include Jameson's uncle Simon, a duchess named Zella, and Katherine, an agent of the third Johnstone brother. Jameson and Avery find two keys and two boxes, Simon holds the third, and the last key turns out to be inside the bell of the Vantage lighthouse. Jameson races Zella to the top, and then Barnes sets up the book's cleanest moral test: take the key and let Zella fall, or save her and lose the game. Jameson saves her. Zella, rather than pocketing the key, trades it to Katherine, who opens the last box and cannot solve the riddle inside. Jameson solves it and asks Rohan for Vantage as his prize, and gets it. Simon offers to serve as the estate's manager, which is his way of admitting he wants a place in the family.

Then everyone is summoned home by a message from Grayson, and the brothers assemble in the tree house from the opening memory. That scene is the reason the frame works. Nash, Grayson, Jameson, and Xander talk through the Phoenix problem and plan the trap for Trowbridge, and Avery pushes Grayson to tell his sisters the truth even though it puts her at risk. The brothers operating as a unit, each with the skill the grandfather trained into him, is the promise the series made from book one, and this is the most direct delivery of it.

Grayson catches Trowbridge stealing from Acacia's trust, returns the money, and GiGi forgives him. He tells her the truth about their father, and she decides to keep it from Savannah. Jameson tells Avery about Alice. And the epilogue jumps to Eve, the half-sister who has been a thorn in the series, receiving the news that Avery is launching the Grandest Game, and deciding out of jealousy to tell Savannah the truth.

Themes, strengths, and the sag

The novel is about family loyalty in at least three flavors. Jameson must decide whether loyalty to a father who vanished is owed at all, and he lands on the answer that it is not, not in the way Ian wants. Grayson must decide whether protecting people means lying to them, and he learns, at some cost, that it does not. The twins have been protected by their mother and by Grayson in ways that keep them ignorant, and the book lets you feel both the comfort and the insult of that.

It is also a book about emotional suppression. Grayson, especially, is shown to be a person who cannot sit with a feeling without turning it into a task. The knife fighting, the fake girlfriend, the refusal to lean on Xander, all of it is a study in what happens to someone taught that competence is the only kind of love.

The weaknesses are the usual mid-series ones. Grayson's plot is heavier than Jameson's, and the financial maneuvering can crawl. Some of the twins' drama is repetitive, with Savannah saying she does not trust Grayson roughly every chapter. Readers who came for Avery and the old puzzles may find her sidelined, and the ending is another cliffhanger that exists to sell the next book.

Still, as a pivot from protagonist to ensemble, it works. Jameson's moral test at the lighthouse, Grayson's tree house confession, and the brotherly reconstruction of the code are the moments that justify the detour. If you loved the trilogy, this is a natural next step, and if you have not started the series, do not begin here.