★★★★★ Israa 09.06.2023 amazon.de

This book (and the whole series) is just amazing. Makes your brain work to solve the puzzles with them. Never a dull moment while reading. puzzles and twists and funny encounters and surprises. The best part was that the book has short chapters which makes you read faster and much more engaging. Wish I could read the whole thing again for the first time.

★★★★★ Mina 09.06.2023 amazon.de

J.L. Barnes did it again - her newest YA story is full of suspense that had me glued to the pages and mysterious characters that have loads of things to hide. Nothing and no one is as it seems.The reader follows the 1st person POV of Avery Grambs. She just resigned herself to again live in her car after her half-sister took her on-off boyfriend in again, when she is told that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne left all his money to her. And that he disinherited his four grandsons and his two daughters. The one condition is that Avery spends one full year at Hawthorne Manor - together with the family who are not at all amused about the way things turned out.And on these thrilling premises, the game starts. Avery soon discovers that there is more than just some rich man’s whim behind the inheritance and she is also very soon convinced that she and the grandsons need each other, if they want to discover what it all is about.Avery is a likable character to follow around, just wide-eyed enough to behave believable in such a „Cinderella“ situation, but also cool and with deadpan responses that show that she is nobody’s pawn. I did not overly like her self-doubt, but I can also admit that it is in sync with how someone like her would react in such a situation.In the end, she gets what she wanted out of the tracking down of Tobias‘s reasons (as did I) and I liked the premises for the next installment.The thing I did not really like were the hints at romance and the love triangle vibes, but I did not hate it like I do in other books, because it actually fits the plot and isn’t too dominant (it especially does not impede Avery‘s good sense). All in all, another of Barnes’ thrilling YA stories that I devoured in just a few hours.