Review: The Inheritance Games

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Avery Grambs is barely surviving. She and her beloved mother were living hand-to-mouth. Then her mother died. Her deadbeat dad Ricky was never around and wouldn't take responsibility, only her half-sister Libby stepped in to assist. However, Libby's on-again, off-again boyfriend causes trouble and it sometimes means Avery has to sleep in her car.

Then Avery gets called to the school principal's office, where a suave, impossibly handsome young man introduces himself as Grayson Hawthorne. Avery has been named as a beneficiary in his late grandfather multi-billionaire Tobias Hawthorne's will and is required to attend the reading of the will.

When Avery gets to the reading of the will she discovers that Tobias has eft his two daughters with a mere pittance and completely disinherited his four grandsons: Nash, Grayson, Jameson, and Xander. He has left all his property and vast wealth to Avery ... and no-one knows why. But Avery has to live in his home, Hawthorne House for a year in order to inherit and all of the Hawthornes can continue to live there too, unless they pose a real and present threat to Avery's life. The will is iron-clad and it is not in anyone's interests to attempt to break it. In the will Tobias also left each of his family and Avery a letter.

As soon as news spreads of the will fake friends and hangers-on emerge from the woodwork. And someone seems to want Avery dead ...

The late Tobias Hawthorne was a genius, always ten or twelve steps ahead of everyone else. He loved anagrams and puzzles of every kind and encouraged his grandsons to do the same. Even the letters he left his grandsons turned out to be a puzzle. The house itself has everything you would expect from an eccentric billionaire: wine cellars, a bowling alley, a cinema, a theatre, five libraries, secret passageways, a bricked off wing, and more secrets than you can shake a stick at.

Thrust into a new school, given hair and beauty training, forced to attend high-profile events and given media training, Avery doesn't know who to trust, it seems a lot of people will do or say anything for money.

But the mystery is ... why did Avery inherit?

I've read hundreds of books over the years where the poor girl is suddenly thrust into a life of unimaginable wealth and seen loads of TV series which are similar. This book has some similarities. Everyone is super-rich and ultra-intelligent. However, this also has puzzles, games within games, twists within twists.

I LOVED it.

View all my reviews