The titular heiress of Rachel Hawkins’s 2024 novel is Ruby McTavish, a North Carolina socialite with a life marked by controversy surrounding her four husbands and their untimely deaths. By the time the novel starts, however, Ruby has been dead for some time. Ruby’s only son, a boy named Cam she adopted late in life, should have inherited the family home and her fortune, but he rejected it all because of his estrangement from the family. It’s only when his uncle’s death exposes some financial mismanagement that Cam is persuaded to return to North Carolina to see what can be done. Cam arrives with his wife Jules in tow, unaware that she is less certain of his decision to have nothing to do with his family and their money.
In addition to Cam’s and Jules’s perspectives, Hawkins also provides us with some news clippings for context, and some letters written by Ruby while she was still alive. In them, we get her full story, from her abduction and rescue as a young child to her disastrous and deadly marriages. Ruby’s letters are essentially just plot dumps, written in a fairly cartoonish and derivative style reminiscent of every other story you’ve ever read about a rich woman.
Similarly, the rest of the living McTavishes, aside from Cam, are cartoonish as well, stock characters from prime-time soap operas, practically twirling their non-existent mustaches as they deliver lines dripping with animus. If your sole criteria for judging a novel is by the number of surprise revelations it has, then The Heiress is the book for you. While some of these revelations are cleverer than others, their sheer total overwhelms the narrative.
