!!!SPOILERS INCLUDED BELOW!!!
Avery Kylie Grambs, the narrator and protagonist of The Inheritance Games trilogy, is a working-class high school junior whose mother died shortly after Avery turned fifteen. When the novel begins, Avery is living in Connecticut with her older half-sister Libby, working as a waitress after school to help Libby pay rent. Avery has two friends: a houseless man named Harry, with whom she plays chess in the park, and fellow teenage girl Max, who moved out of Avery’s town before high school and who communicates with Avery primarily via text. Intelligent, logical, and practical, Avery plans to win a scholarship to the University of Connecticut, study actuarial science, and get a steady job—until Texas philanthropist Tobias Hawthorne dies and wills her almost all of his $46.2 billion fortune. Forced to live at Tobias’s estate, Hawthorne House, by the conditions of his will, Avery ends up in proximity to the disinherited Hawthorne family. When one of Tobias’s grandsons, bad-boy 18-year-old Jameson, convinces Avery that eccentric Tobias willed Avery his fortune as part of a puzzle game that his survivors are intended to solve, curious and competitive Avery embarks on a quest to decode the puzzle—all the while secretly hoping that the answer has something to do with her mother, whose death she is still deeply grieving. Simultaneously, Avery is fighting her attraction to Jameson, whom she fears views her as a mere tool to solve Tobias’s puzzle, and to Jameson’s older brother Grayson, a logical systems thinker like Avery herself. After Avery and Tobias’s grandsons finally solve the puzzle, Avery learns that Tobias had been surveilling her since they met by chance when she was a child, and that her houseless friend Harry is actually Tobias’s long-lost and presumed-dead son, Toby.
