El legado Hawthorne [The Hawthorne Legacy] — Escape Room With Billions at Stake

I was supposed to be folding laundry. That was the plan — throw on something light in Spanish while I worked through a mountain of clothes my kids had somehow generated in three days. Instead, I stood in the laundry room for forty minutes with a half-folded towel in my hands because Avery Grambs was about to crack another cipher and I physically could not press pause.

That's the kind of book El legado Hawthorne is. It hijacks your attention and refuses to give it back.

This second entry in Jennifer Lynn Barnes' Inheritance Games series picks up with Avery still reeling from her inexplicable billions-dollar inheritance and no closer to understanding why Tobias Hawthorne chose her. The mystery deepens with new players, new codes, and new reasons to distrust everyone in the mansion — including the Hawthorne grandsons who keep pulling Avery toward them like she's caught in competing gravitational fields. I had the same relentless forward momentum problem with The Inheritance Games, where Barnes first perfected this chapter-ending-as-trap technique on me. Barnes writes chapters that average maybe five or six minutes in audio, each one ending on a mini-bomb that makes skipping to the next one feel involuntary. I burned through the whole ten and a half hours across a long weekend, and the only reason I didn't finish it in one sitting is because my kids needed dinner.

Let me talk about Cynthia De Pando's narration, because she's doing something specific that I want to give her credit for. The Hawthorne brothers — Grayson and Jameson in particular — could easily blur together as "brooding rich boy #1" and "brooding rich boy #2." De Pando gives Grayson a controlled, almost clipped delivery, like every word has been pre-approved by his internal legal team. Jameson gets looser phrasing, a hint of recklessness in how his lines land. When Avery is working through a puzzle out loud, De Pando shifts into this focused, slightly breathless mode that mirrors exactly how it feels to be on the edge of solving something. She's not doing vocal gymnastics, but she doesn't need to. The emotional architecture is there — fear when Avery's life is genuinely threatened, confusion when the clues don't add up, that specific frustrated tenderness of being drawn to someone you're not sure you should trust.

The translation by Martina García Serra deserves mention because in audio form, a stilted translation can destroy momentum. I've listened to Spanish-language versions of English YA before where the dialogue sounded like it had been run through a corporate memo filter. That's not the case here. De Pando's work in Una herencia en juego had the same quality — she and a good translator together make you forget you're listening in translation at all. The banter between Avery and the Hawthorne brothers sounds like actual people talking — the rhythms feel natural, the slang lands, and the riddles maintain their wordplay logic in Spanish without requiring mental footnotes.

Now, here's where you need to know your own tolerance levels. The love triangle — honestly, it's more of a love polygon by this point — runs hot through the entire book. If you live for the "who will she choose" tension, the interrupted almost-kisses, the loaded silences across crowded rooms, this will scratch that itch hard. If love triangles make you want to throw your phone out the car window, you should know going in that there's no resolution here. Barnes is playing the long game with the romance, and this book ends with things more tangled than they started.

The puzzle-solving remains the strongest element. Barnes constructs her riddles with real care, and in audio form there's a particular pleasure in trying to work them out alongside Avery before she gets there. I caught one before she did and felt embarrassingly triumphant about it. The escape-room energy is real — except the stakes involve a dead billionaire's hidden motives and people who may want Avery dead rather than just a ticking clock and a padlock.

My honest criticism: the plot runs on characters keeping secrets from each other in ways that strain believability. People withhold crucial information not because it makes psychological sense but because Barnes needs them to for the next reveal to land. Avery herself sometimes ignores obvious connections that any reasonable person would flag, and certain coincidences stack up past the point of plausibility. You either ride with this — accepting it as part of the YA thriller contract — or it starts to irritate you. I found myself rolling my eyes maybe three times but never seriously enough to stop listening.

The other thing to know: this book ends on a setup for the next installment. If you start this series, you're committing to all of it. That cliffhanger isn't gentle.

Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)

If you loved the first book's puzzle-box structure and want more cipher-cracking with higher stakes, this is your next listen — especially in De Pando's Spanish narration. Skip it if love polygons drive you up a wall or if you need a story that wraps up cleanly; this one leaves threads dangling on purpose.

As a parent who mostly listens to audiobooks in stolen chunks — during school pickup lines, late-night kitchen cleanup, that sacred twenty minutes before falling asleep — I can say this format rewards fragmented listening surprisingly well. Those short chapters mean you can stop at natural breakpoints without losing the thread. Whether you actually will stop is another question entirely.