The Inheritance Games is basically Knives Out meets The Westing Game with a touch of any standard YA romance. The heroine Avery comes from a poor background with a good bit of family disfunction, but she plans to get out of that by going to college for actuarial science. These plans are interrupted when she finds out that she’s been named heiress to a massive fortune left to her by Tobias Hawthorne, whom she’s never heard of. To get the billions, all she has to do is live in his family home for one year. The catches are 1) the house is one big puzzle maze and 2) a chunk of the Hawthorne family still lives there (1 of the 2 daughters and 4 grandsons (who are all accomplished and around Avery’s age and all pretty good looking- you can guess what’s going to happen there)). Tobias left every member of the family a letter (at least the grandchild generation) which is the beginning of some sort of treasure/puzzle hunt. Avery as it turns out is pretty good at this kind of thing, and the 4 grandsons have been raised by Tobias to be good at it too. Besides possible threat/pressure from the Hawthornes, Avery also faces public scrutiny, as well as trying to figure out why Tobias chose her. There are hints that Avery’s dead mother had some kind of secret. And the final puzzle is who was Emily and what was her hold on the Hawthorne family?
Besides the suspense in trying to figure out who is one whose side and Avery trying to deal with things from her past and new present (which includes a possible murder attempt in the woods), the actual interesting mystery is why Avery? All the puzzles left behind by Tobias aren’t all that interesting and they mostly appear to depend on knowledge the reader doesn’t have but the characters do; they just have to figure out what means and matters when/what. The personal tensions between Avery and various Hawthornes are pretty standard (who does she actually like, who might be trustworthy, who may have tried to kill her, etc) and also not interesting. Emily turns out to be interesting, especially since it’s only gradually that we (and Avery) find out not just who she was and why she mattered, but what actually happened to her and why. The Emily factor also turns out to be part of the reason why the romantic drama doesn’t get too much, because for me at least, that kind of thing can easily take over the story, and thankfully it doesn’t. Although, I have to say, had Emily been alive, this whole thing could almost have been a certain YA movie about a girl trying to fit into a new above her head kind of situation that involves possible romance, school, and a handful of other girls. More than this might be spoilers.
A lot of the suspense stuff was a little predictable, with two major exceptions. First, the why Avery. This Is question is largely answered by the end, but there is a piece at least potentially still to come in the remainder of the trilogy. Second, Avery has a second realization at the very end of the novel that connects someone from her previous life to her current one; I did not see that one coming, and it’s the main reason I might track down book 2.
