Avery Grambs is just trying to get by. Her mom's dead, her dad's a deadbeat, and she's being nominally raised by her older sister Libby, who's in an abusive relationship and Avery's about ready to start living in her car to avoid that situation. She has dreams of going into actuarial science and making a life for herself as soon as she can.
And then out of fucking nowhere, she finds out that she's inherited billions of dollars from Tobias Hawthorne, a now-dead billionaire Texan SHE'S NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE IN HER LIFE. She's forced to live in the family mansion in Texas for a year and isn't allowed to throw out any of the mostly-disinherited family members, most of whom are reasonably cheesed off at not getting much money in the will. We're told the will is diehard, that if anyone challenges it they lose their money, and that in a previous will, Tobias planned to disinherit his entire family anyway and just give the majority of the money to charity. And no, Avery ISN'T in any way related to the Hawthorne family (DNA testing appears to have gone on quickly offscreen). SO WHY THE HELL DID SOME STRANGER GIFT A TEENAGER BILLIONS?
All Avery gets in a posthumous letter from her benefactor is a note saying "I'm sorry." THE FUCK?
Naturally, the female relatives in the family--Tobias's daughters and one confusingly-vaguely-related teen girl named Thea--Have Issues with this. And then there's four hot young grandsons ranging from 17-22 hanging around the house. Nash, the oldest "rescues" people and at one point was engaged to Avery's new lawyer (huh?). Grayson is suspicious of Avery. Xander and Jameson are friendlier and more intrigued, but particularly Jameson, who introduces Avery to his grandfather's obsession with puzzles and how this is all some kind of giant puzzle to be solved.
So essentially this book is about solving the mysteries that a dead guy left behind, combined with the mystery of Dead Girl Emily--the housekeepers' granddaughter who had bad health and various entanglements with the teenagers. And Libby's shitty abusive boyfriend is all PAYDAY!!!!! and gets more and more horrendous as the book goes on, of course.
I'll say this: it's intriguing, but not much is solved or resolved by the end of this, which I found VERY FRUSTRATING. By the end of the book you will only have slightly more of a clue as to "why Avery?" and I was really irritated by that. I also can't figure out for the life of me if I am supposed to be rooting for Avery to have any kind of romance with any of the Hawthorne boys. She kisses one of them, but seems to get attracted to at least the younger three at different points, and they're all a mix of "I'm not sure if they're good or bad or have ulterior motives or WHAT" here. Do I want her to be with any of them? Is that a good idea? HELL IF I KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.
I'm not even sure if I want to read the next book (though I did reserve it at the library, I admit it...), given how irritated I am at the finish of this one. I usually really like this author's books (The Fixer and The Long Game being my favorites for tricksy shit) and you'd think this is more of the same, but the vague open-door-ness of this one was just frustrating as fuck and as things went on and you're more like "I don't think much of anything is going to resolve here," uck. There's one Crucial Reveal at the end about someone we've barely heard of that suddenly becomes A Big Deal. I also kind of wondered at the attention paid to Avery's perpetually-locked-up best friend Max, who seems to only be there so Avery can't manage to have a conversation with her most of the time? The girl needs support outside of the situation and she can't get any, apparently.
I don't know....it was just a frustrating experience for me to read this book. Kinda leaves a bad taste in the mouth when reading it made you annoyed and mad, and usually the author's a lot better at not doing that. Three stars.
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