The Inheritance Games

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A Girl Sleeping in Her Car
2. Hawthorne House and Four Grandsons
3. Libby, Skye, Zara, Alisa and Oren
4. Letters, Libraries and the Red Will
5. Emily, Jameson, Grayson and the Numbers
6. Shootings, Toby and What Bugged Me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up The Inheritance Games because I wanted a mystery that moves fast and does not ask me to learn a magic system first. A friend said it reads like Knives Out for teens, with puzzles in the walls. That sold me. I finished it in two sittings, mostly because every chapter ends with Avery finding another door that should not be there.

This is the first book in The Inheritance Games series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, published September 1, 2020 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. The US hardcover runs 384 pages with ISBN 9781368052405. It is told in first person by Avery, it is aimed at readers twelve and up, and it sets up a trilogy plus later sequels. I went in expecting a Cinderella story with codes. What I got was stranger and sadder, about a dead billionaire who kept playing with his family after he died.

Avery Kylie Grambs is seventeen and broke in Connecticut. Her mother died just after Avery turned fifteen. Her father, Ricky Grambs, is out of the picture. Her half sister Libby, who is seven years older and shares the same father, became her legal guardian. Libby works as an orderly in a nursing home, dyes her hair, tries to keep things cheerful, and keeps taking back her boyfriend Drake Sanders. Drake is controlling and mean in the way that starts verbal and gets physical. At the start of the book Avery is sleeping in her car some nights to avoid sharing an apartment with him.

Avery has a plan and it is small on purpose. Survive high school. Keep her grades up. Win a scholarship somewhere far away. She plays chess in the park for cash against a homeless man named Harry. She is good at reading people fast because she has had to be. Then the principal calls her out of class and there is a strange boy in the office with gray eyes who asks if the name Tobias Hawthorne means anything to her. It does not. The boy is Grayson Hawthorne. He tells her his grandfather just died and put her in his will.

A Girl Sleeping in Her Car

The opening chapters work because Avery feels real before the money shows up. Barnes gives her habits instead of a tragic speech. Avery counts things. She notices exits. She keeps postcards her mother left and thinks about places she might go. Libby calls her things like kiddo and tries to cook. They fight about Drake in a circle that will feel familiar if you have ever loved someone who keeps going back to a bad partner.

Harry the chess player matters more than he seems. Avery plays him every day, usually wins, pockets a little money. He is funny, a bit untidy, harmless. I remembered him only vaguely by the middle of the book, which is exactly what Barnes wants. Keep him in the back of your mind.

The call to Texas comes through lawyers. A young woman named Alisa Ortega says she works for the firm that represents the Hawthorne estate. Her father was Tobias Hawthorne's attorney for years, so she grew up around Hawthorne House. She flies Avery and Libby to Texas in a private jet for the reading. Libby does not tell Drake where they are going, which tells you everything about how safe she feels at home.

Avery learns on the flight just how rich Tobias Hawthorne was. Not comfortable rich. Not big house rich. Forty six point two billion dollars rich, ninth richest in the country at the time, richest man in Texas. Philanthropist in the papers, puzzle builder in real life, dead at seventy eight. Avery has never met him. She has never heard of him. She assumes there is a mistake.

There is no mistake, or at least not the kind she hopes for.

Hawthorne House and Four Grandsons

Hawthorne House is the second main character. It sits on a huge estate outside Dallas with gates, staff, a security team, gardens, guest houses, and inside, a maze. Walls have passages. Fireplaces swing open. Closets lead to other rooms. Bookshelves hide stairs. Tobias built games into the architecture itself, with riddles carved under desks and keys taped behind paintings. Avery gets lost in her first hour there, which I liked. She is supposed to own the place and she cannot find the bathroom.

Then there are the grandsons. Four boys, same mother, four different fathers whose names their mother never shares. Nash Hawthorne is the oldest, in his mid twenties, tall, Texas accent thick, cowboy boots, rides a motorcycle, fixes cars. He decided years ago he wanted nothing to do with the money or the games. Grayson Hawthorne is nineteen, controlled, formal, used to being called the heir apparent. Jameson Hawthorne is eighteen, green eyed, restless, drinks too much, drives too fast, treats life like a bet he intends to win. Alexander Hawthorne, called Xander, is almost seventeen, round faced, talks fast, builds things, cracks jokes when the room gets tense.

Xander is the first one who is kind to Avery. He pops out of a coat closet that is really a passage entrance and offers to show her tricks instead of threatening her. Nash warns her flat out that she might be a pawn, not a player, and that she should be careful. Grayson looks at her like she forged a signature. Jameson looks at her like she is a clue someone left for him personally.

The reading happens in the Great Room. Lawyers hand out envelopes with letters Tobias wrote to each person. Skye Hawthorne, the boys' mother, is there in flowing clothes talking about energy and stars. Zara Hawthorne Calligaris, Tobias's other daughter and Skye's sister, is there sharp and angry. The family expects billions to stay in the family. Tobias leaves some specific gifts and jobs to staff and family, then leaves almost everything to Avery. The one condition is blunt. Live in Hawthorne House for one year, still living there at the end, or lose it all to charity. Avery can walk away. If she stays, she has to live with people who just lost everything to her.

I thought this setup would feel silly. It does not, because Barnes lets everyone be furious in a believable way. Zara accuses Skye of scheming. Skye performs hurt. The boys go quiet in different ways. Avery says almost nothing because what can she say. She is seventeen and someone just handed her a haunted mansion and a target.

Libby, Skye, Zara, Alisa and Oren

A lot of reviews focus on the boys, but the adults and Libby shape the plot just as much.

Libby comes to Texas with Avery, then flies back to Connecticut to pack up their apartment. That trip breaks her life open. Drake finds out about the money from the news after he leaks the story himself, then turns on Libby when she says the money is Avery's, not theirs. He gives her a black eye. She finally leaves him, but she does not block him cleanly, and guilt follows her back to Texas. Nash notices the bruise right away. He has a protective streak the size of the estate, and he starts looking out for Libby in a way that is gentle without being simple. They talk about cars. He gives her space. It is one of the few soft threads in a sharp book, and I rooted for it.

Skye and Zara are sisters who handle anger in opposite ways. Zara is direct. She hires lawyers, she pushes, she asks who Avery really is in front of everyone. Skye is slippery. She cries, she hugs her sons, she tells stories about Tobias being cruel, and she keeps score. Jameson says Skye treats her children as hers and hers alone, and you see it in how she withholds their fathers' names and plays them against each other. I did not trust Skye from her first scene, and the book rewards that distrust.

Alisa Ortega becomes Avery's main contact for legal and school logistics. She enrolls Avery in a private school, arranges security, explains what Avery can and cannot do as a minor heir. She is professional but not cold. Her family history with the Hawthornes makes her useful and a little compromised. She knew the house as a kid. She knows where the staff gossip flows.

John Oren, called Oren, runs Avery's security detail. He is calm, large, watchful, always a few steps away with an earpiece. He checks rooms before Avery enters them. He tells her plain rules about gates and cars and events. In a house full of people performing, Oren is steady. Avery tests him a few times, sneaks around him, then learns why he is strict. Someone really is trying to hurt her.

Drake follows Libby to Texas later, and that thread turns violent. I will get to that in the final section because it ties to the shooting, but the short version is that Drake is not just an ex who texts too much. He is a tool other people are willing to use.

Letters, Libraries and the Red Will

Once Avery decides to stay, Jameson pulls her into the game. His logic is simple. His grandfather never did anything without a reason, and Avery is the biggest riddle Tobias ever left. If she helps solve it, she might learn why she was chosen. If she refuses, she will still be a target, only blind.

They start with the letters Tobias left the grandsons. Each boy got a personal note, and none of them say outright why Avery inherits. The tone is classic Tobias. Affectionate, teasing, full of nudges toward books and places. Avery reads them with permission and notices patterns the boys missed because they were reading as sons, not as solvers.

That leads to the libraries. Hawthorne House has more than one, and Tobias loved hiding messages in books. Avery, Jameson, and Grayson hunt for a volume with a mismatched cover, argue about catalog systems, climb ladders, pull out books that have been hollowed or marked. It is fun in a physical way. You can picture dust and ladder wheels and Xander bringing snacks and then solving a cipher faster than the others because he thinks in systems.

What they find points to a second document written in red ink. People in the house call it the Red Will. It is not a replacement for the legal will. It is more like a puzzle layer Tobias added, with lines about names being keys. Avery learns that Tobias chose his grandsons' middle names himself, which was odd and controlling even for him. Davenport, Winchester, Sheffield, Grayson, and the others are not random family names. They map to places or objects on the estate. A bridge. A chapel. A grove. A workshop.

I loved this stretch. It feels like an escape room built by a rich man with too much time, except the stakes keep intruding. Paparazzi circle the gates. Classmates at the new school stare. Thea Calligaris, Zara's stepdaughter, warns Avery to stay away from the brothers, especially Jameson. Rebecca Laughlin, quiet and grieving, watches from the edges. Max, a bright girl Avery befriends at school, helps her feel normal for an hour at a time. Then Avery goes home to a house where the walls whisper.

The method is always the same. Find the place tied to a middle name. Look for a number or a mark Tobias left there. Write it down. Ask what the numbers make. Avery is good at this because she grew up spotting small details to stay safe, not because she is a genius. Barnes keeps her process visible. She guesses wrong. She backtracks. Xander builds a board. Grayson checks legal records. Jameson climbs where he should not climb.

Emily, Jameson, Grayson and the Numbers

You cannot understand the brothers without Emily Laughlin. Emily was Rebecca's sister, beautiful, popular, dated Jameson then Grayson, or both in a messy overlap depending on who tells the story. She died about a year before Avery arrives. The official story is an accident or suicide after she fell during an event at Hawthorne House. The emotional story is heavier. She played Jameson and Grayson against each other, on purpose, and they let her, and Tobias encouraged the competition as another game. After she died, the brothers stopped speaking honestly to each other. Grayson iced over. Jameson sped up.

Thea knows a lot about that time and does not share it freely. She tells Avery that getting between Jameson and Grayson will end badly, and she is not wrong to worry. Avery feels pulled in both directions. Grayson is careful with her. He tutors her in how to act at formal events, warns her when she is being used, looks away when he feels too much. Jameson is direct with her. He grabs her hand and runs toward the next clue, laughs when she keeps up, gets quiet when they find something tied to Emily.

The love triangle is the part that will divide readers. I found it believable for about two hundred pages because Avery is lonely and both boys offer different kinds of attention. Grayson offers protection and order. Jameson offers partnership and thrill. Barnes writes kisses and near kisses with a lot of tension and very little explicit content, which fits the age range. But there are scenes where the puzzle stops so the romance can have a moment on a balcony or in a passage, and I started skimming those to get back to the numbers.

The numbers lead Avery to older history. Tobias changed his will twenty years earlier to add the middle name Tattersall to his own signature line after his son died. That son was Tobias Hawthorne II, called Toby, the younger brother of Skye and Zara. Toby supposedly died in a fire as a teenager. Tobias never got over it. He rewrote his whole plan a year before his death to give everything to Avery. Avery starts asking the obvious question. Is she related to Toby. Is she Tobias's secret granddaughter. Blood tests and dates get discussed. Zara pushes the con artist theory. Skye cries about privacy. Alisa tries to keep it legal.

Avery chases school records, old photos, staff memories. She learns her mother spent time in Texas years ago. She learns Toby was troubled, funny, loved puzzles like his father but hated the pressure. She finds a photo that stops her cold, because Toby looks like someone she knows. I will not spoil every step here, since the fun is watching Avery connect middle names to map points to safe combinations, but the turn is clear. This was never only about money. Tobias was trying to force his family to find someone they lost.

Shootings, Toby and What Bugged Me

The last hundred pages move fast and get scary. Avery attends a formal charity gala at the house because heirs have to be seen. She wears a dress chosen by stylists, answers polite questions badly, dances with Grayson while Jameson watches. It sounds glamorous and reads stressful, which is the point. Everyone in the room thinks she stole something.

After the gala, threats sharpen. Windows break. Messages warn her to leave. Oren doubles patrols. Avery keeps solving anyway, because stopping will not make her safer and she knows it.

Drake comes back into the story in the worst way. Skye, furious about the will and willing to gamble with lives, lets Drake onto the estate grounds the night of an attack. Drake shoots at Avery. He misses killing her, but the intent is clear. Oren and his team lock the house down. Police question Libby because they assume she might have helped Drake. She did not, but she had not blocked his texts, and guilt eats her. Nash stays near Libby through it. Grayson confronts Skye privately and tells Avery he handled his mother. Skye leaves the estate and is banned from returning. I found this resolution chilling because Grayson does not explain exactly what he said. He just makes his mother vanish from Avery's life, which shows how much power these boys have when they choose to use it.

The final puzzle payoff centers on Toby. Avery finds proof that Toby did not die in that fire. Records were faked or incomplete. Photos, a hidden room, Toby's handwriting on old game notes, all point to survival. And the bigger shock lands in a quiet scene, not a shootout. The homeless man from the park, Harry, the chess partner Avery beat for grocery money, is Toby. He has been alive for years, living off the grid, memory damaged, hiding from his own name. Tobias knew, or suspected, and built the whole inheritance game partly to pull Toby back into the light and partly to give Avery resources to finish the job.

That reveal reframes the first chapter. Avery was never random. Her mother knew Toby years earlier in a way the book only starts to explain here and leaves open for the sequel. Avery played chess every day with the lost heir without knowing it, while Tobias watched from afar through lawyers and reports. It is sentimental, yes, but Barnes earns it by planting Harry early and never winking.

So, fair criticism, since this book needs it. The middle sags around school and gala prep. There are too many fittings, interviews, and warnings from classmates that repeat the same point. Avery is good at everything a little too quickly. Ciphers, chess, reading rooms, handling press, standing up to Zara. She has flaws on paper, she acts rashly and trusts Jameson too fast, but the plot keeps rewarding her. The puzzles sometimes need leaps I could not follow without the characters explaining after. A mark on a wall means a specific safe, a middle name means a specific tree, because Tobias thought so. That is fine for a billionaire game, but it means you cannot solve ahead of Avery. You watch her solve.

The billionaire fantasy also gets glossy. Private jets, custom dresses, secret libraries, handsome boys who fight over who gets to help you. Barnes knows this and tries to ground it with Libby's bruise and Drake's gun and Emily's death, but the shine never fully comes off. If you want a story where money solves nothing, this is not it. Money solves a lot here, then creates new problems that more money and puzzles must fix.

Still, I closed the book satisfied and started the sequel the same night. The central question, why Avery, gets a partial answer that feels earned. Toby lives. Tobias played a long game to repair what he broke. Avery chooses to stay the year, not just for cash but to protect Libby and to see the game through. The last image that stayed with me was not a kiss. It was Avery setting up a chessboard in a huge empty room, waiting for the next clue, finally playing on a board big enough for her.

If you like mysteries with floor plans, secret passages, and siblings who wound each other in specific ways, read the canonical English first book, The Inheritance Games, not the variant listings or the Dutch translation De erfenis that show up nearby in catalogs. Start here, meet Nash, Grayson, Jameson, and Xander in order, learn Tobias through his traps, and let Alisa and Oren do their jobs while you argue about which brother is worse for Avery. I am team no brother for at least one book, let her breathe, but I understand the appeal.

FAQ

Who are the four Hawthorne brothers?

The brothers are Nash, Grayson, Jameson and Xander Hawthorne, sons of Skye with different fathers. Nash is the oldest and stays out of the games, Grayson is nineteen and controlled, Jameson is eighteen and restless, and Xander is almost seventeen and builds inventions.

Why did Tobias Hawthorne leave his fortune to Avery?

Tobias built the will as a game to force his family to find his son Toby, who supposedly died in a fire twenty years earlier. Avery has a past link to Toby through her mother and her chess games with Harry, and the full answer continues in The Hawthorne Legacy.

Is De erfenis a sequel to The Inheritance Games?

No. De erfenis is the Dutch title for this same first book, published by Blossom Books. Start with the canonical English The Inheritance Games, book one of The Inheritance Games series.