The Inheritance Games
OVER 9 MILLION COPIES SOLD OF THE #1 BESTSELLING SERIES Don't miss this New York Times bestselling "impossible to put down" (Buzzfeed) novel with deadly stakes, thrilling twists, and juicy secrets--perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying and Knives Out. Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why--or even who Tobias Hawthorne is. To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch--and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with every expectation that one day, they would inherit billions. Heir apparent Grayson Hawthorne is convinced that Avery must be a conwoman, and he's determined to take her down. His brother, Jameson, views her as their grandfather's last hurrah: a twisted riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Caught in a world of wealth and privilege with danger around every turn, Avery will have to play the game herself just to survive. Catch every thrilling twist and turn of The Inheritance Games Saga, including the Grandest Game, the thrilling new series set in the world of the Inheritance Games:
- The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)
- The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games #2)
- The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)
- The Brothers Hawthorne (The Inheritance Games #4)
- Games Untold
- The Grandest Game (The Grandest Game #1)
- Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2)
- The Gilded Blade (The Grandest Game #3)
- The Same Backward as Forward
For more unputdownable reads from Jennifer Lynn Barnes, don't miss the killer The Naturals series, and The Debutantes duet.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
What Bookclubbers are saying about this book
✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI
Readers say *The Inheritance Games* is an engaging YA mystery with fast pacing, clever puzzles, and a sprawling mansion full of hidden clues and secre...
This was a good mystery with a little romance splashed in. Definitely more teen/young adult oriented. The writing wasn't amazing, but I enjoyed the storyline and characters. I'm excited to read the rest of the series, but I was slightly let down by the reveal at the end of this book. I'm hoping there's more to it going forward.
This book lacks a lot of things for me. I found the main character to be a bit annoying. The “romance” is completely flat. The repetition in this book gets tiredsome after awhile, on top of that it’s pretty predictable. It started as an easy read in the beginning but towards the middle of the book it became a lot more difficult. The characters in this book aren’t very like able, I didn’t find myself connecting or even caring about them. Definitely not my type of book unfortunately.
Imagine waking up one day to discover that a billionaire you've never met has left you his entire fortune complete with a sprawling historic mansion. No marriage required, no long lost prince, just billions of dollars and a house full of secrets. Sign me up! Well, maybe not once the attempted murder starts.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes' The Inheritance Games is an entertaining mystery where seventeen-year-old Avery Grambs goes from struggling to make ends meet to inheriting Tobias Hawthorne's multibillion dollar estate. There's just one catch. She must live in Hawthorne House for an entire year alongside the family he disinherited. The house is equipped with four brilliant and suspicious grandsons, secret passages, clues hidden throughout, and a secrets nobody will explain. Avery has officially entered the world's most expensive family feud.
I adored the opening where Barnes wastes no time introducing Avery to a world of unimaginable wealth, complicated family dynamics, and questionable motives. The Hawthorne family has spent generations anticipating their inheritance. Now, some random teenage girl has walked away with everything. Naturally, nobody trusts her and she has absolutely no reason to trust them. Her sudden celebrity status brings an unsettling loss of privacy and control over her own life. Apparently, becoming a billionaire comes with a few strings attached.
The mystery gave me Agatha Christie vibes. Hidden messages, peculiar names, secret compartments, and a mansion that seems to hold more secrets than its inhabitants make Hawthorne House a fascinating setting. I also caught hints of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher in the family's troubled history and the estate's imposing presence. Barnes transforms the mansion into an elaborate puzzle. It was entertaining watching Avery piece together clues alongside the Hawthorne brothers.
The brothers bring their own personalities and motivations to the mystery. Grayson is suspicious and protective of his family's legacy, Jameson treats Avery like another puzzle to solve, and Xander provides some welcome humor with his eccentric inventions and Rube Goldberg obsession. Their competing interests make it difficult to determine who might be an ally versus who has something to hide.
My only criticism is that I suspected Avery's inheritance had more to do with Tobias Hawthorne's desire to teach his family a lesson than any secret biological connection. Her complete lack of knowledge about the Hawthornes made that explanation seem fairly obvious from the beginning. I would have appreciated a more surprising explanation for his decision. Fortunately, the smaller mysteries, shifting suspicions, and increasingly dangerous circumstances kept the experience entertaining.
Pick up The Inheritance Games for a clever and fast paced young adult mystery with Knives Out energy, elaborate scavenger hunts, and wealthy families behaving suspiciously.
This book kept being recommended as a mystery/detective story. Which makes me wonder if readers have actually read proper mystery stuff? This is mostly romance and melodrama. The mystery is not even important to solve and may actually make things worse if solved.
It starts out as a young adult remake of grand The Westing Game. To such a degree that it reads like an official remake - as otherwise how did it avoid a lawsuit? The book title, the billionaire dying creating a puzzling game, inheritance fighting with a weird girl as the lead, the chess game with an old mystery man, the name clues, the deadly attacks, the quirky characters. Everything reused works and everything new is quite bad.
She moves in with the family of the billionaire as part of the will's demand. And promptly is extremely sexually interested in a man there who she assumes is her brother as why else would she as a random girl be named in the will? Hence we get a bunch of pages about how tight his shirt is, how close his lips are to hers, how little clothes she's wearing while speaking to him, how charming his statements are, how much she is restraining herself. Who is this aimed at? It's obviously quite repulsive and forced as she's often claiming she has not been interested in boys overall and avoids them. Which makes sense as she lives in her car if she wanted to live in a big house she could start dating any middle-class man. Or any man with an apartment would do. Instead she fully avoids men until she falls in love with this creep.
She is also constantly mocked, bullied, pushed around, and back talked to her face. This is while being a billionaire. She can fire or kick out any of these people yet just takes it. If this was a mystery then it would work as she would remain calm to collect evidence. Yet here the will is already solved right away. The mystery is why she's in the will not if she is the person inheriting his billions. But why does she care? Why would the reader care? She is constantly trying to solve micro problems. Like her half-sister being beaten by her ex. Yet when it comes to it she has money enough to pay him off so that he will leave forever. Her sister's mom going to the media? They pay her off. Most problems are solved this way: she has a problem, we linger on it for pages with deep descriptions of all emotions involved, she solves the problem without doing anything as the mansion has a ton of workers who have connections to the police and powerful companies so they can fix anything. She never leaves to house to solve anything and never actually needs to even leave her bed to solve the biggest problems as her staff solves it all off screen.
The weird thing is that The Westing Game is more mature than this book despite the main character being a small girl not a super horny young woman with her own car. The topics and themes were much more mature. Even the race and gender themes were more controversial and brutal. Here everything is more child friendly and woke ... except her extreme horniness towards her "brother". Hence it doesn't quite find a new genre while ruining the essence of the original story.
The dialogue writing is the worst I've ever seen. A character goes "hi", the lead then takes half a page to think about that situation and her upbringing, then responds with hi verbally. That's all dialogue here! Everything is painful to read as she's a terrible writer. The simplified English and plain style will appeal to non-native speakers. It's an extremely easy read for this reason as even tiny scenes and emotions have endless exposition.
Yet what we have here is the start of a book series. There is little to no story. I would maybe call this act 2? We don't solve anything. And frankly I don't care about this story anymore.
It starts out as a young adult remake of grand The Westing Game. To such a degree that it reads like an official remake - as otherwise how did it avoid a lawsuit? The book title, the billionaire dying creating a puzzling game, inheritance fighting with a weird girl as the lead, the chess game with an old mystery man, the name clues, the deadly attacks, the quirky characters. Everything reused works and everything new is quite bad.
She moves in with the family of the billionaire as part of the will's demand. And promptly is extremely sexually interested in a man there who she assumes is her brother as why else would she as a random girl be named in the will? Hence we get a bunch of pages about how tight his shirt is, how close his lips are to hers, how little clothes she's wearing while speaking to him, how charming his statements are, how much she is restraining herself. Who is this aimed at? It's obviously quite repulsive and forced as she's often claiming she has not been interested in boys overall and avoids them. Which makes sense as she lives in her car if she wanted to live in a big house she could start dating any middle-class man. Or any man with an apartment would do. Instead she fully avoids men until she falls in love with this creep.
She is also constantly mocked, bullied, pushed around, and back talked to her face. This is while being a billionaire. She can fire or kick out any of these people yet just takes it. If this was a mystery then it would work as she would remain calm to collect evidence. Yet here the will is already solved right away. The mystery is why she's in the will not if she is the person inheriting his billions. But why does she care? Why would the reader care? She is constantly trying to solve micro problems. Like her half-sister being beaten by her ex. Yet when it comes to it she has money enough to pay him off so that he will leave forever. Her sister's mom going to the media? They pay her off. Most problems are solved this way: she has a problem, we linger on it for pages with deep descriptions of all emotions involved, she solves the problem without doing anything as the mansion has a ton of workers who have connections to the police and powerful companies so they can fix anything. She never leaves to house to solve anything and never actually needs to even leave her bed to solve the biggest problems as her staff solves it all off screen.
The weird thing is that The Westing Game is more mature than this book despite the main character being a small girl not a super horny young woman with her own car. The topics and themes were much more mature. Even the race and gender themes were more controversial and brutal. Here everything is more child friendly and woke ... except her extreme horniness towards her "brother". Hence it doesn't quite find a new genre while ruining the essence of the original story.
The dialogue writing is the worst I've ever seen. A character goes "hi", the lead then takes half a page to think about that situation and her upbringing, then responds with hi verbally. That's all dialogue here! Everything is painful to read as she's a terrible writer. The simplified English and plain style will appeal to non-native speakers. It's an extremely easy read for this reason as even tiny scenes and emotions have endless exposition.
Yet what we have here is the start of a book series. There is little to no story. I would maybe call this act 2? We don't solve anything. And frankly I don't care about this story anymore.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.