Some dialogue still feels like exposition to move the plot while lacking full logical steps, or serves as heightened drama to get us to the next point. As I’ve said of Lynn Barnes a few times now, her ability to keep you enticed with a page-turning mystery while effectively being my most hated form of drama (teen drama) is brilliant.

The story of The Final Gambit concerns itself with what the old man knew that very few others did. It’s a game of chess with all the pieces moving into place as the old man plays a few moves ahead of everyone.

This kicks off the final game, with a new mystery and villain to decipher near the eve of Ave’s inheritance. Now with Toby captured once again, a young woman appears on the doorstep (or rather at the gate) of Hawthorne House claiming to be Toby’s daughter, Eve. The bombshell revealed that despite Toby’s relationship with Ave’s mother, Tobias senior’s inheritance decision was not a paternal one and Toby’s only kid is with another woman. It is difficult to talk about something three books in without spoilers, especially in a story that is linked so closely to The Hawthrone Legacy. As I’ve stated, despite it being a personal issue, I still have my misgivings about relationships in entertainment, books in particular. The adventure and page-turning pacing returns with a mystery hanging over the ghost that is Emily haunting Gray following his desire to distance himself from Ave after she chose Jameson last time. Now on the brink of gaining billions from Tobias Hawthorne, a couple of ghosts are crawling from the crypt of the Hawthorne House to haunt the lives of Ave, Gray, Xander, Nash, and Jameson.

However, the adventure leading up to the queen of this puzzling world getting her inheritance certainly did what The Hawthorne Legacy couldn’t. On the other end of reading through the not-so Final Gambit of Avery Kylie Grambs, I can’t say the final chapters satisfied me as much as they should have. I’ve spoken about my disagreements with the endings of some books before, such as Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After and Tokyo Dreaming, or even VS Nelson’s The Archivist. While I had my misgivings with some of the direction that The Hawthorne Legacy took, I dove into Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ The Final Gambit with open arms. For me, capping off a book or a series is a very risky gamble for any author to pull off.

The final gambit book