The Hawthorne Legacy

I told myself I would wait before starting The Hawthorne Legacy. I had just finished the first book and needed sleep. But I kept thinking about Harry, the older man who played chess with Avery in the park for grocery money, and the reveal that he was really Toby Hawthorne, the son everyone thought died in a fire twenty years earlier. I read one chapter to quiet my brain and then stayed up much too late.

This is the second book in The Inheritance Games series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, published September 7, 2021 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. The US hardcover runs 368 pages with ISBN 9780759557635. It starts about a week after book one ends. Avery Kylie Grambs must still live in Hawthorne House in Texas for a full year to keep the billions Tobias Hawthorne left her. The four grandsons are still there. Nash, steady and protective. Grayson, controlled and polite. Jameson, restless and hungry for the next clue. Xander, talkative and quick with gadgets. Libby, Avery's half sister, plus her friend Max, plus lawyer Alisa Ortega and security lead Oren, all return. Read book one first. This one spoils it on every page.

The question driving it sounds simple. Who is Toby, why did he vanish, and why did Tobias leave everything to Avery. The search moves from a sealed wing of the house to a mountain home in Colorado, then to Oregon and an island, then to a hospital bed and a locked storage room. There is a wager, a cipher disk, old charities, postcards with hidden writing, a televised kiss that is tactical rather than romantic, a bomb, and a late reveal about a girl named Eve. I found this sequel messier than the first, but hard to put down.

A wager in the tunnels

Avery and Jameson start in the passages under Hawthorne House, stuck. They know Toby was alive recently as Harry and has run again. Jameson wants to move. Avery wants answers, but she is tired of being handled as a clue. They make a bet. If Jameson finds Toby first, Avery forgives him for going cold after the Blackwood discovery in book one, when he learned she was not chosen for some fated reason and pulled back. If Avery finds Toby first, Jameson stops flirting and stops trying to charm his way into another kiss. It is half dare and half boundary setting, and it shapes how they act around each other for the rest of the book.

Grayson warns that a living Toby could threaten the will itself. He is not being cruel. He was raised as the likely heir, lost that role, built a careful friendship with Avery, and now the floor moves again. Xander copes by building timelines and bringing food to late night searches. Nash mostly looks after Libby and tries to keep the house calm. I liked that split. Jameson needs the hunt. Grayson needs order. Xander needs puzzles. Nash needs the people he cares about to stay safe.

Outside pressure builds fast. Skye, mother of the four boys, is now with Ricky Grambs, Avery's absent legal father. Alisa has to contain them while Avery juggles school, public events, and Oren's safety rules. Someone leaves a bloody cow heart in Avery's room to scare her off the Toby hunt. It has the opposite effect. The early searching feels physical in a good way. Dust. Bad flashlights. Stuck doors. Arguments about library indexes. Avery guesses wrong and backtracks, which I appreciated after book one sometimes made her too quick.

The sealed wing and the walls that talk

The first real break comes from Toby's old rooms, closed for years. Beds made. School papers and trophies where a teenager left them. Avery and Jameson find a poem that scans wrong, plus marked legal books that point to a cipher disk. With trial and error they pull out an unfinished piece of Toby's writing. Then, with a black light, they find his diary on the walls, written in hidden ink.

Those walls change the case. Toby learned as a teen that he was adopted. Nobody told him straight. He pieced it together, and it broke his trust in Tobias. His hidden notes swing between jokes and anger. He loved games like his father but hated being treated as another project. Avery recognizes the handwriting. It matches the signature for her father on her own birth certificate, listed as Ricky Grambs. For much of the book she holds a private hope that Toby is her biological father. That would explain the inheritance in one neat line. Tobias left everything to his secret granddaughter to draw his lost son back.

This was my favorite stretch. A sealed wing is familiar, but the small items land. A chipped mug. A book with a cracked spine. A circled list of charities. The cipher work is shown step by step, with Avery guessing, Jameson pushing, Xander correcting, and Grayson asking if any of it holds up legally. That teamwork feels earned by now.

The flaw starts here too. Avery masters things fast. Chess. Codes. Reading rooms. Handling press. Standing up to Zara. She does rush and trust too quickly, and she pays for it later, but every lock opens within a chapter or two. I wanted one puzzle to resist longer, to make the house feel stubborn again.

Charities, fathers and True North

Barnes widens the case through an older will Tobias wrote soon after Toby vanished. It names four charities. Mapped out, they link to the three young people who died on Hawthorne Island with Toby, plus Toby himself. One ties to recovery. One ties to a memorial fund. One points toward Arizona and a man named Sheffield Grayson.

While Jameson and Grayson head to Arizona, Xander digs at home and learns Toby plus those three friends all spent time at a treatment center called Camden House. They met while trying to get clean. That reframes the island fire. It was not only rich kids being careless on private property. It was a group with past struggles, unsupervised, carrying guilt.

Arizona hits Grayson hard. Sheffield Grayson, uncle of one of the boys who died, tells them Toby caused the fire and Tobias paid to hush it up. Back home Skye confirms the other blow. After the island fire she had a brief involvement with Sheffield, and Sheffield is Grayson's biological father. Each of Skye's sons has a different father, a fact she hid for years while Tobias gave the boys middle names tied to places and past deals. Grayson takes it badly. He gets sharp, then withdrawn, then angry in public at the worst time.

Avery follows a separate line about a compass and true north in Skye's share of the will. It points to True North, the Hawthorne vacation home in the Colorado mountains. The trip is crowded. Avery with Max and Libby and Bex and Thea, plus all four brothers with Alisa and security. The house pays off though. Between rooms once used by Skye and Zara, a hidden space holds a note and a photo from an old fight between the sisters. It also points to Nash's biological father, caretaker Jake Nash in Costa Rica, who later helps reveal hidden writing with a powder.

Colorado also brings an ugly public moment. To block Skye and Ricky from selling an interview, Alisa puts Avery and Grayson on camera. They are told to stay bland. Grayson gets baited. Avery almost blurts her theory that Toby might be her father. Grayson kisses her hard to stop her, on live video. Tactical, rough, awkward. I was glad Barnes leaves it uncomfortable instead of romantic. It shows what sudden fame does to private choices.

Postcards, Hannah and Hawthorne Island

The Colorado note says Tobias always knew Toby survived and kept searching for years. It points to a safe deposit box with search files and the police report. Before Avery reaches it, she has to face her mother's postcards. The woman Avery knew as Sarah, tired and loving and stretched thin, was really Hannah Rooney. The places Tobias searched match where Hannah sent cards from. Warmed carefully, the cards show hidden writing. Short love notes. Apologies. Small jokes. A relationship in the margins.

Hannah was the sister of Kaylie Rooney, the young woman who died on the island. The Rooneys had ties to dealing and Hannah wanted out. After the fire, with help from a fisherman named Jackson Currie near Rockaway Watch in Oregon, Hannah found Toby barely alive and nursed him for weeks. They fell in love while he healed. It did not last. The death of Hannah's sister plus Toby's guilt plus Tobias watching from far away wore it down. But it shaped Avery's start. Toby was there the night Avery was born during a storm when no ambulance could arrive. He delivered her, signed Ricky's name on the birth certificate to shield Hannah, named her, and thought of her as his even while knowing she was not his by blood.

Avery goes to Oregon and the island to check this. Locals are cold. Her grandmother on that side wants no contact. Jackson Currie, older and tired of strangers, talks because Avery is Hannah's daughter, and he kept a small metal disk Toby left behind. The police report says Toby soaked the house in accelerant and opened gas lines after learning he was adopted and fighting with his father. He meant to burn an empty house as payback. Before he lit anything, lightning struck. The house burned with his friends inside. Toby lived, barely. The book leaves some blur around exact seconds, which felt honest. Fire and storm and panic do not make clean memories.

This travel stretch sags in places. Planes, hotels, security checks, repeat talks with lawyers about DNA. At the same time Hannah finally becomes a full person rather than a memory. A young woman who nursed a burned boy, loved him, lost her sister in the same fire, changed her name, raised two girls with little help, and hid love letters in postcard ink. I wished Libby had more pages here. She lost the same mother and grieves in a quieter, angrier way that gets less room.

The bomb, the storage room and Eve

Coming home from the island trip, Avery's private plane blows up on the runway before she boards. She lives, then spends about a week in a coma. She wakes with no lasting injury, which felt too tidy to me. The fallout lands better. Police arrest Skye and Ricky for the bombing. Avery doubts it while still groggy. Selfish and weak, yes, but this kind of killing is outside what she knows of them. She is right. Sheffield Grayson planned it to use Avery as bait, convinced she is Toby's daughter and blaming Toby for his nephew Colin's death.

DNA comes back during recovery. Ricky Grambs is Avery's biological father. Toby is not. One door closes. Another question opens wider. If blood does not explain the choice, what does. The book's answer is that Tobias watched Toby love Hannah, watched Hannah raise Avery, watched Avery play chess with Harry without knowing him, and saw a girl who stayed calm under pressure and looked after her sister. He used her to lure Toby. He also gave her resources to survive the glare. Both can be true, and Avery does not forgive him fast, which I respected.

Then the trap. Thea knocks and pulls Avery through a passage, saying Bex is held and she had no choice. Mellie, a new maid, knocks Avery out with chloroform. Avery wakes tied in a storage room that smells of fuel. Sheffield waits with Eli, a guard from her own detail. Sheffield holds a DNA paper he says proves Avery is Toby's and plans to kill Toby when he appears. Mellie and Eli turn out to be siblings with a younger half sister, Eve, who is Toby's biological daughter from years ago. They took house jobs and worked with Sheffield, less from hate for Avery than from a wish to force Toby out so he would provide for Eve.

Toby comes. Older, thin, moving like someone who still feels old burns. He offers himself for Avery and states he is not her father by blood. Sheffield waves his paper until Mellie admits the sample was hers. Eve is the child on that report. In the noise Avery works her ties loose. Mellie shoots Sheffield before he can kill Toby and Avery. Fast, no speeches. I was grateful. A longer standoff would have felt staged.

Toby and Avery get a quiet talk after. He was there at her birth, named her, loved Hannah, and always counted Avery as his in feeling if not biology. He will not stay. Staying would drag Eve into the lights and threats Avery lives under. He agrees to provide for Eve privately, takes the metal disk Jackson had kept, and vanishes again. Avery begs and he still goes, from a belief that his presence harms people. Sad and frustrating, and right for who he is. Avery ends the book legally emancipated, free of Ricky's claim, and clear for now about Jameson. They meet on the roof and she kisses him after their coin toss ritual. Grayson's story points elsewhere. Nash and Libby move toward something steadier. Eve stays hidden. The disk is gone with Toby, and Tobias left more layers for the next book.

What held and what wore thin

The construction holds because clues tie to people. The sealed rooms show Toby's hurt. The charities show Tobias's guilt and control. The postcards show Hannah's love. True North shows Skye and Zara as sisters before they turned rivals. Even the powder scene shows Xander's joy and Libby's patience with rich house nonsense. The brothers stay distinct without labels. Nash steadies. Grayson tightens. Jameson runs ahead. Xander builds. Thea and Bex gain shading around fear and loyalty. Oren stays the one adult who picks safety over games.

My gripes are pacing and weight. The middle travel repeats. Arrive, meet cold locals, find paper, get threatened, fly out. The coma skips recovery in a way that feels convenient. Avery survives a blast and mostly loses a week. The romance bet at the start frames affection as a prize, and though Avery reclaims the choice at the end, Max and Libby lose pages to it. Max is loyal and funny and vanishes during the riskiest part. Libby carries grief and fear about Hannah and Ricky with too little space.

Who should pick this up. If book one left you needing Toby's story, read it. If you like wills with codes, hidden ink, sealed rooms, and family trees that act as maps, you will have fun. If you wanted the series to question wealth more hard, this will not meet that hope. Money buys flights and access, then buys new trouble that needs more money to manage. I accept that as the engine here, even as I notice it.

What stayed with me was Hannah more than the fortune. A young woman who cared for a burned boy, loved him, lost her sister in the same fire, changed her name, and raised two girls with little help. Avery goes looking for a father and finds a mother instead. That turn gave the puzzles a heart I had not expected.