Book 1
Avery Kylie Gramble’s dad had abandoned her and her mother a long time ago. He had another daughter (Avery’s older half-sister, Libby), but he abandoned her too. Ever since Avery’s mom died (from a rare blood disorder that she was too far down on the transplant list to receive a cure), Libby became Avery’s legal guardian. To Avery’s dismay, Libby also has the tendency to keep letting her no-good boyfriend (Drake) back in, even though he can be violent.
On the weekends, Avery likes to play chess with a homeless man who lives in the park (who, if she beats, has to let her buy him breakfast). She’s smart, but without a huge amount of savings, she’s hoping on college scholarships to study actuarial science.
Her life changes when she finds out that the 9th richest man in the US (Tobias Hawthorne) died and left the majority of his 46.2 billion dollar inheritance to her.
She solves some riddles along the way as she looks for answers, for example:
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If you have a set of hundreds of keys, it’s possible that all but one are copies of the exact same interlock mechanism (even if the handle looks different). So instead of having to test every single key, you only have to look for the one that’s different.
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In the following letter, every phrase is a proverb except for one. You have to fill it in: “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, clueing you in to look for a book with a mismatched dust jacket.
“Better the devil you know than the one you don’t -- or is it? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. All that glitters is not gold. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. There but for the grace of God go I. // Don’t judge.”
Why her? Is it because her name rearranged spells “a very risky gamble”? Is it because her birthday (October 18th) coincides with the day that Emily Laughlin (daughter of Tobias’s head servants) died? Is it because the “homeless” man she knows might actually be Tobias’s missing son?
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Book 2: The Hawthorne Legacy
Avery’s estranged and deadbeat “biological father” is trying to come back into her life as her “guardian” in hopes that he can get money. However, Avery wants nothing to do with him, because if he really cared about her, he would have reached out before she became a billionaire.
Meanwhile, Avery tries to track down Harry, but not everyone believes her that he might be the “deceased” Toby. To find clues, she breaks into Toby’s old wing of Hawthorne House, where she discovers that he used to write on the walls there with invisible ink as a form of diary. One of his entries expresses his dismay at the news that he is adopted (and was actually Mrs. Laughlin’s daughter’s child, who was young and unwed and thus secretly passed off her baby to Mrs. Hawthorne to be raised). Does this mean that Avery might be his daughter? (In the last book, her DNA was compared to Tobias’s, which was negative, but maybe it would match Toby’s if Toby’s doesn’t match Tobias’s). To further this suspicion, the cursive/print handwriting that Toby writes with on his walls matches Ricky Gramb’s signature on Avery’s birth certificate (implying that maybe Toby was covering up who he was).
Avery takes a closer look at the story of when Toby “died”. According to the press, it was a party gone wrong. The three men who died (Toby and two others who had just come out of rehab) are portrayed as innocent, while the girl (Kaylie, a former addict and criminal who was previously convicted of arson) was portrayed as the villian. Everyone’s body was found except for Toby’s, but due to the storm that night, it doesn’t seem unrealistic that his body was carried away by the sea.
It turns out that the full story of what happened was that Toby was so upset at his family that he wanted to burn down one of the vacation homes that meant a lot to his father. He bought the accelerant and doused the house, and the plan was to light the match far away so they can see it burn from a safe distance. However, lightning ignited the accelerant and started the fire prematurely. Toby was nursed back to health by a fisherman and Avery’s mom (whose real name is Hannah, but had later changed her name to Sarah). Toby and Avery’s mom fell in love, and Hannah/Sarah convinced Toby not to commit suicide due to the guilt of what happened. Toby changed his name to Harry, and he told Hannah/Sarah that they couldn’t be together because he believed that she deserved better. He later slept with Millie the servant’s mom and bore a child (Eve), but he always kept an eye on Sarah (his true love). When Sarah was delivering baby Avery (whose father really was RIcky) in a house alone, Harry came to the rescue and helped her. That’s why he signed Ricky’s signature. Harry also got to help pick out Avery’s name (and her middle name was named after Kaylie, who was Sarah’s sister, minus one letter).
Tobias suspected that Toby was alive and had hired private investigators to look for him. Tobias himself also tried searching for him, and must have suspected that Avery was connected to him.
Sheffield Grayson, the uncle of one of the men who died in the fire, had slept with Skye shortly after the fire in spite of the Hawthorne family. The child who was conceived was given a first name of the man’s last name (consistent for Skye’s other children as well). But Sheffield still wanted revenge on Toby. He tried to plant a bomb and kidnap Avery to lure Toby out of hiding, which he eventually did. Mellie helped with this (since she’s sore that Toby seemed to have forgotten about his real daughter), but once Mellie realized that Sheffield was planning on killing Avery and Toby, Mellie stepped up and shot Sheffield, saving the day. Before they depart, Toby tells Avery that he always considered her his daughter (and the reason why he showed up as a homeless man in the park just a few days after Avery’s mom passed away was to make sure Avery was okay). Avery tries to convince Toby that he can stay with her at the Hawthorne House, but he’s reluctant to go back.
We are left with two main questions:
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Will Toby ever publicly return to his true identity and stay with Avery?
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Will Avery choose Jameson or Grayson as her romantic interest?
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Book 3: The Final Gambit
Eve (Toby’s biological daughter) shows up to Hawthorne House, announcing that Toby’s been kidnapped and that this was the place that Toby told her to go to if anything ever happened to him. Later, Alisha (Avery’s lawyer, and the only person in Avery’s inner circle who walks around without a bodyguard) also gets kidnapped. It’s revealed that the person who is holding Toby and Alisha is Vincent Blake.
Decades ago, Vincent Blake worked with Tobias Hawthorne to develop a patent. During that time, Tobias secretly worked on his own patent that was the same thing but better. By doing this, Tobias disqualified the joint patent, conning Vincent out of billions of dollars.
If that wasn’t enough bad blood, Vincent’s son WIlliam (Liam for short) was Toby’s dad. After Mrs. Laughlin’s daughter (Mallory) bore Toby, Mallory got into a fight with Liam and hit him repeatedly. Mr. Laughlin and Toby broke Mallory off Liam but purposefully neglected Liam medical attention, allowing him to die. They then secretly buried his remains to keep the story hidden.
Vincent wants revenge for these two things, warning Avery that he “always wins in the end”.
Grayson takes Alisha’s place as hostage. Vincent accepts this trade offer.
It turns out that Eve is working with Vincent Blake, and she was just trying to get the inside scoop on where Avery was at in the puzzle.
When Avery shows up at Vincent’s place to confront him, she makes a deal. If she can beat Eve at a game of chess, then he has to let Greyson and Toby go, and he can’t come after her or anyone close to her again. Not long into the game, Avery realizes that she can beat Eve in just a few moves, so she makes an even riskier play. She forfeits the game on purpose and then throws a fit. Avery then challenges Vincent to a double-or-nothing bet, where if she can beat him in a game of chess, she gets her earlier request plus he must do whatever he can to mitigate news about Sheffield Grayson’s murder (from the last book). If she loses, she will give her entire fortune to Vincent. Vincent accepts, thinking that she’s not that great at chess. When Avery wins, he realizes that she hustled him.
Avery actually gives away most of the fortune to charity, although she does keep the Hawthorne House, a vacation house, and 2 billion dollars (which is still a crazy amount to live on).