The Grandest Game

Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s 2024 young adult mystery The Grandest Game is the first book in a new series set in the world of her earlier best-selling series The Inheritance Games. The Grandest Game centers on a puzzle-solving competition held by billionaire Avery Grambs and the wealthy Hawthorne brothers. They’ve invited seven players to an island to compete for millions of dollars. Although the narration focuses on the perspectives of three competitors (Gigi, Lyra, and Rohan), it explores the complex motivations of others and reveals that almost every competitor harbors secrets. In this high-stakes environment, the players make and break alliances as they try to solve the contest’s puzzles and decide whom to trust.

This study guide refers to the 2024 Little, Brown and Company hardcover first edition.

Content Warning: The Grandest Game makes references to child abuse, self-harm, post-traumatic stress disorder, and death by suicide.

Plot Summary

A year before billionaire Avery Grambs and the Hawthorne brothers host the second annual Grandest Game, the powerful secret society known as the Devil’s Mercy sends young Londoner Rohan away, telling him that he can return and take over the entire organization if he earns 10 million pounds. He decides to do this by winning the next Grandest Game.

Hidden around the world are four golden tickets for the game, while Avery chooses players to give three other tickets: One goes to Lyra Kane, a student who needs money for college and to save her family home. She struggles with recovered memories and dreams of her father dying by suicide when she was a child. His last words led her to believe that Tobias Hawthorne (the Hawthorne brothers’ grandfather, who left Avery Grambs his fortune) was responsible. Rohan finds more than one hidden ticket. He keeps one and ensures that another goes to Gigi Grayson, the half-sister of Grayson Hawthorne. Gigi, who refused to accept a ticket directly from Avery, is unaware of Rohan’s interference and thinks she earned the ticket. She wants to win the game to give away money to others, hoping to make up for the terrible things her now-deceased father did. Gigi has kept her father’s death a secret from her twin, Savannah, to protect her from knowing that their father died while trying to kill Avery. The ticket Avery originally intended for Gigi goes to Savannah.

Rohan, Gigi, Lyra, and Savannah arrive at Hawthorne Island for the competition and meet three other players: Brady Daniels and Knox Landry (both in their early twenties) and 81-year-old Odette Morales. The game’s designers, Avery Grambs and the Hawthorne brothers Xander, Jameson, and Nash, are there to host and observe the competition from a distance. The fourth Hawthorne brother, Grayson, hasn’t received any information about the games; the players learn that he’ll be the hosts’ representative during the games and that they don’t want him to accidentally give away any information during the contest. Lyra tries to distance herself from Grayson. After she started remembering her father’s death, she called Grayson to ask for information about Tobias Hawthorne and her father but found Grayson cold and dismissive. The hosts send the players off to explore the island and gather useful information and hidden objects. Gigi finds scuba gear, a knife, and a necklace. At sundown, they attend a costume ball at the main house.

At the ball, Grayson dances with Lyra and tries to explain that he did investigate her question about her father and hit a dead end but had no way to contact her. She doesn’t believe him and tells him to stay away from her. However, Avery and the other Hawthorne brothers secretly planned to draft Grayson into the game as the eighth player, and Lyra is on a team with him and Odette. Savannah and Rohan are another team, as are Gigi, Brady, and Knox. The hosts lock each team in a room. Each team must solve a series of puzzles, escape their room, and make it to the island’s docks before dawn, or the entire team will be eliminated.

While working on the first puzzle, Lyra and Grayson learn about one another’s vulnerabilities and strengths, and a romantic attraction grows between them. Gigi’s initial attraction to Brady grows too, contrasting her feelings about Knox, whom she finds aggressive and surly. Savannah and Rohan, both ruthlessly competitive, struggle to work together as each thinks about how to manipulate the other. Despite distractions, all three teams successfully solve the first puzzles.

The second puzzle presents each team with a different riddle. At one point, Gigi’s necklace breaks, and she discovers that it contains a listening device. She realizes that the scuba gear, knife, and necklace were planted on the island by an outsider, not by the game’s designers. Brady explains that some players are working on behalf of wealthy sponsors interested in the outcome of the game and that Knox is working for one such family, the Thorps. Knox insists that his sponsors didn’t leave the gear there for him. They wonder if an outsider is still on the island. Gigi learns that Knox and Brady have been friends since childhood; when Brady tells them that his mother has cancer, Knox is devastated.

During the third puzzle, Gigi learns that Brady and Knox fell out over the disappearance of Knox’s girlfriend, Calla, when the two were teens. Brady thinks Calla’s family, the Thorps, abducted her to end her relationship with Knox. Knox claims she left of her own accord; he thinks Brady was, and still is, in love with Calla. The two men reunited a year ago to play the first Grandest Game together, but Knox abandoned Brady before the game ended when Calla’s father, Orion Thorp, offered Knox a private jet ride as a shortcut in the final race. Gigi’s attraction to Brady grows stronger, but she resists it, despite his flirting, because she worries about his continuing attachment to Calla.

Rohan and Savannah keep trying to manipulate one another. During the second puzzle, a physical altercation leads to both giving in and sharing confidences: Rohan reveals that he works for the Devil’s Mercy, and Savannah tells him that she wants to win the game because of her father. During the third puzzle, they bicker about taking their only hint. Rohan realizes that her comment about playing the game for her father links to her anger about others’ mistakes. They decide to accept the hint, and the hosts tell them they must complete a challenge to earn it: a version of Truth or Dare requiring them to reveal more about themselves to one another and be vulnerable in ways they find uniquely uncomfortable. Savannah reveals that she’s playing the game to win something besides money.

Solving the riddle of the second puzzle reminds Lyra of the final riddle her father spoke before his death by suicide, and she becomes distracted. Her distraction worsens during the third puzzle, when a video triggers a vivid flashback to finding her father’s body. Grayson pulls her out of the flashback and calms her, and their relationship deepens. As they try to decode the meaning of the Greek letters on a series of film reels, Lyra realizes that the symbol written on the wall near her father’s body was the Greek letter “omega.” Grayson, Lyra, and Odette are all surprised when one film they watch during this third challenge is a film Odette starred in when she was much younger, and they realize that the game designers somehow engineered it so that Odette would be in this specific room.

After solving their third puzzles, as the teams enter the final phase of the challenge shortly before dawn, the power suddenly goes out, temporarily trapping the players. During the outage, Rohan accuses Savannah of having sponsors who created the power outage for their own reasons; Savannah doesn’t deny this. The two form a temporary alliance, deciding to work together until they’ve eliminated the other players and then return to competing against one another. In a moment of privacy during the outage, Gigi speaks into the listening device she found in her necklace. When she tells whoever is listening that she knows they’re there, she’s shocked to hear a response from a voice she recognizes: that of a dangerous and attractive man she met once, a year ago, whom she refers to as “Mimosas.”

All three teams escape their rooms before dawn, but not all make it to the docks before sunrise. Running to the docks, Gigi falls and injures herself. Knox carries her the rest of the way, but they don’t arrive in time, and the team is eliminated. Gigi learns that Brady is still in love with Calla and has simply been manipulating her as part of his game strategy. Odette surrenders her place in the competition to Brady. Before leaving, she tells Grayson and Lyra that she once worked for the law firm that represented Tobias Hawthorne. She believes that Tobias’s wife, Anne, was involved in Lyra’s father’s death. Rohan learns that Savannah knows her father is dead. She’s trying to win the Grandest Game because she wants to use the publicity to accuse Avery of killing her father. Someone captures and drugs Gigi. Lyra and Grayson realize that Avery didn’t send Lyra’s invitation and that someone else wanted her on the island. In the novel’s epilogue, a mysterious figure watches the players on the island, deciding whether to intervene.