The Inheritance Games

The Inheritance Games is a young adult mystery by the American writer Jennifer Lynn Barnes, published in 2020.

Hawthorne House is the second problem in the novel, because Tobias Hawthorne spent his life building puzzles and the house is one of them: hidden passages, paintings that open, rooms built around a single question, and a will that seems designed to set his four grandsons against whoever received it. Avery moves in knowing she is unwelcome, and the book follows her as she works out why an old man would make a stranger his heir while leaving the family that had grown up in his shadow with nothing. The four brothers each take a different approach to her, and the plot advances through the codes and ciphers the dead man left behind, which turn out to be about more than money. The novel was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and became a bestseller, and it began a series that continued with The Hawthorne Legacy and The Final Gambit, and later with The Brothers Hawthorne and a spin-off series.