YA Review: The Gilded Blade (The Grandest Game #3) (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)

In the stunning finale to the global phenomenon of the Inheritance Games Saga (over 6 million copies sold!), discover danger, riches, romance—and the staggering answers to long-brewing mysteries.

Everyone is a player.

In the grandest of games, there is everything to win—money, love, power, revenge—and even more to lose. From Texas to Prague to London and beyond, the Hawthorne family, the players from the Grandest Game, and allies old and new are drawn into a web of centuries-old secrets and mind-bending puzzles. Every clue pulls them deeper; every answer demands a price.

To survive, they must unravel the mysteries that bind them together…but some truths are deadly.

Discover danger, riches, romance—and the long-awaited revelations at the heart of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s most intricate and explosive puzzle yet.

All games must come to an end.

Don’t miss a moment of The Inheritance Games Saga, including the thrilling Grandest Game spinoff series, set in the world of the Inheritance Games:

Gilded Blade is the last book in the trilogy that started with The Grandest Game and is being advertised as the last book in the Inheritance Game world. Therefore, it brings everything into question that you know about the people you have met through all the books. It relies heavily on the premise that the reader has read all the books. This hefty conclusion is told from the perspective of Lyra, Jameson, Gigi, and Rohan. Through the relentless pursuit of the truth, our vast network of Hawthorne and Hawthorne-adjacent characters uncover a secret society of women that spans centuries and is the spiders in the shadow keeping would-be kings accountable. A few people believed to be dead are not, which is an interesting choice, because it stretches what is possible and makes you question everything.

The author does a fantastic job bringing in the pain and drama of all their pasts and shedding light on everything. I am so used to Avery being in the story that I kept waiting for an interlude or breakaway chapter to find out what was happening from her perspective, but we were kept in suspense and the raw faith that the author wouldn’t hurt her through the whole book.

There are a fair number of deaths in the final scenes and sacrifices by others that lead to an epic conclusion. While this is meant to be the end of an era for this series, in true Hawthorne fashion, there are still plenty of characters and possibilities for future novels if the author decides she wants to return.