Title: The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Genre: Young Adult Mystery
Published: August 30, 2022
About the Book
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.
Secrets upon secrets. Riddles upon riddles. In this game, there are hearts and lives at stake—and there is nothing more Hawthorne than winning.
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About the Author
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She’s been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a “practice book” and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.
Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She’ll be spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad, doing autism research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
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My Thoughts
The risky gamble might just pay off after all, and it did so in The Final Gambit. Avery is on the cusp of turning 18 and stands to inherit billions. There’s one last puzzle that needs solving. But some things have drastically changed since book two. How will everyone come together when there is tension and everyone is off doing their own thing? Is Avery the one to bring the boys back, to have them help her with this final puzzle?
Am I the only one not ready to let go of Max? I feel like she has a future, a story uniquely her own, and Barnes could take Max and run with it. She’s such a fun character and could have a fantastic story even if she wasn’t entwined in all the characters we’ve grown to love throughout this series. But alas, we’re at the end, and that’s okay. Did I want to see some things go differently? Yes, absolutely. But I think things worked out how they needed to, and it’s very satisfying.
There is little as rewarding as getting to the end of a trilogy that is so well done, how fun each puzzle is, how every room in the mansion has meaning and is more than meets the eye. It’s romance and mystery, with some humor thrown in, which makes for a great combo. I surely can’t do the story justice in all of my gushing. This is such a smart series and an absolutely delightful ending.
Favorite Quotes
“I come in peace,” he announced gravely. “I come with pie.”
“My mind is more like a roller coaster inside a labyrinth buried in an M. C. Escher painting that is riding on another roller coaster.”
“Rage didn’t simmer. It burned.”
“I never learned how to be good or honorable, Heiress… I learned how to be bad in the most strategic ways.”
“This was the way he and I were supposed to be: no running, no hiding, no recriminations, no regrets.”
“Silence had never sounded this loud.”
“Some words were just words, and others were like fire. I felt it catching inside of me, spreading, as searing as any kiss.”
This has been such a fun book and tour. Check out the other blogs on the tour at TBR and Beyond.
Rae's Reading Lounge 
Love the cover. What an exciting-sounding series. I’m glad you enjoyed this.
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