Avery's fortune, life, and loves are on the line in the game that everyone will be talking about.
To inherit billions, all Avery Kylie Grambs has to do is survive a few more weeks living in Hawthorne House. The paparazzi are dogging her every step. Financial pressures are building. Danger is a fact of life. And the only thing getting Avery through it all is the Hawthorne brothers. Her life is intertwined with theirs. She knows their secrets and they know her.
But as the clock ticks down to the moment when Avery will become the richest teenager on the planet, trouble arrives in the form of a visitor who needs her help—and whose presence in Hawthorne House could change everything. It soon becomes clear that there is one last puzzle to solve, and Avery and the Hawthorne brothers are drawn into a dangerous game against an unknown and powerful player.
Title : The Final Gambit
Author : Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Series : The Inheritance Games (book three)
Page Count : 400
Genre : YA contemporary / mystery
Publisher : Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Release Date : August 30, 2022
Reviewer : Hollis
Rating : ★ ★
Hollis' 2 star review
And here I thought book two was messy! This one redefined the term.
Listen, you already know I haven't been on board with this romance since day one but I honestly, truly, thought we would rectify it by the end. Okay, I didn't think, I hoped. Because otherwise.. why all the angst? Why the build-up? Why give the not-endgame character all the emotional agonies and.. I mean, he wasn't super layered but he had far more going on than the one Avery did end up with, even though Barnes tried to do something more with him in this final ("final") book -- also, if your character has to spend three books trying to convince herself and her love interest that she's made her choice, the right choice, then you probably aren't convincing the readers. I sure wasn't! To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
Sadly this also applies to the one element of this series that had kept me going. I say one element but it was the main point to it all (or at least fifty percent of it, if you consider how much time was actually devoted to the unfulfilling romance) and that was the big mystery. The final tie-in to make it all, everything, all the mini-mysteries, all the smaller puzzles, make sense. And with exception to a few of the minutiae.. this particular one felt really thin. Not only do we have a character who is new to the scene and the most obviously sus human being (in so many ways) ever, we are forced to basically rehash the entire second book for their benefit. This was such a waste of time and I really don't understand why we bothered with it. On the one hand, it gave us a different POV/bird's eye view to what it had been like for everyone confronted with Avery's existence way back in book one but, if this was really necessary, I wish the author had gone about it a different way. But maybe that's just because the character forcing this perspective was so obvious. And painful how no one could see it.
Equally painful was the ending. Taken out of context of the book, and without these characters, I like it. I think it's a good moral choice and one I wish we could see happen in similar (haha but you know what I mean) real-life situations. I just don't know if I'm totally sold about what that choice means for the characters themselves (with maybe one exception) and where they're supposedly left -- I know, I know, it's not really over. And maybe that's why this feels unsatisfying; because all the loose ends are likely left loose because there's more to come. But considered within the context of the trilogy? It's frustrating.
So, yes, I didn't really expect to be here without even a three star to recommend it but there is still time for this to be redeemed. At least mystery-wise. I know I'll never get satisfaction in the other realm. Let's see if The Brothers Hawthorne, which feels like a side-quest but I'll take it anyway, can bring some redemption to this series.
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