The Inheritance Games is the first book in The Inheritance Games collection by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. The series has three available books (The Inheritance Games, The Hawthorne Legacy, and The Final Gambit). 

 The collection’s first book has been nominated for many awards like the Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adults and the Edgar Award for Young Adults and won the Teen Buckeye Book Award in 2021. The New York Times bestseller has also grown in popularity on social media sites like TikTok. 

The series starts with Avery Grambs inheriting a huge amount of money after being named in the will of Tobias Hawthorne, a billionaire who she has never heard of. When she arrives and meets the grandsons of the billionaire the several questions she had all but doubled. As everyone is confused about how Avery was named in the will things start to look more like clues than mistakes. Avery teams up with one of the grandsons, Jameson Hawthorne, to find out what riddles Tobias Hawthorne has come up with this time.

The series has a lot of popular tropes that you’d see in today’s media. There’s mystery, found family, romance, and the occasional action scene on every page in the collection. I could see a fan of the Knives Out movies being interested in this book series, with its constant twists and new riddles.

The story is easy to read, and the narrative is also easily understandable and intriguing. The story can slow down points and almost make you want to take a break from reading, but if you stick it out it’s not long before your flipping threw page after page again.

The first book is in my opinion the best one in the series so far. You get to meet the characters for the first time and get to read about their relationships with the ones surrounding them. I would also say that the plot of The Inheritance Games is the best one in the series when it comes to story, with a plot that would define how the rest of the story is told it makes you wonder if a character is still going to be dealing with this in the following books.

The second book The Hawthorne Legacy would be third on my list. The story that’s in this book works off of the first one but halfway through it starts to feel as though the story up to this point has been drawn out. It does take the cliffhanger that the first book left off in a good direction despite this.

The Final Gambit is the third book in the series but my second favorite in the collection. With being the seemingly final installment of this part of the story I feel like the ending is a good one for this part of these characters’ stories, bridges are built, questions are answered, and things are lost. A good resolution to problems both made and preexisting.

Until The Brothers Hawthorne is released read some of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s other works like The Naturals series which would be good series for someone who has enjoyed Criminals Minds. Until then, who knows what’s going to happen to these characters and the occasional large amount of cash, but maybe you’ll end up inheriting these books.