Harry Hawthorne

Quick Facts

• Role: Surprise late-game narrator and hidden antagonist; secret half-brother to Grace
• First appearance: Chapter 16 (sudden POV shift)
• Narration: Chapters 16–18
• Key relationships: Simon Artemis (biological father), Grace Bernard (half-sister), Christopher and Lottie Hawthorne (parents who raised him), Kelly McIntosh (prison informant)
• Outcome: Kills Simon, inherits the Artemis fortune, and blackmails Grace into silence

Who They Are

Polished, watchful, and coolly transactional, Harry Hawthorne arrives as the novel’s most destabilizing twist: the unseen half-brother to Grace Bernard and illegitimate son of Simon Artemis. Sliding into the story just as Grace seeks closure, he rewrites the power dynamics with a single revelation—he’s been there all along, studying her, learning her methods, and waiting for the moment to claim the prize she thinks she’s earned.

Harry embodies the book’s bleak vision of family and betrayal: the well-bred son who had every advantage yet proves as ruthless as the unloved daughter he shadows. By stealing Grace’s final act of revenge, he doesn’t just thwart her plan; he reframes it as his stepping-stone, reducing morality to calculation and survival.

Personality & Traits

Harry’s voice is crisp and dispassionate, the tone of a man who prefers systems to feelings. He prizes “rationality,” codes of taste, and social order, yet his choices reveal a pragmatist willing to let others bloody their hands so he can keep his clean—and profit.

• Pragmatic and unsentimental: He seeks Simon not for love but liquidity, insisting he’s “not a dreamer.” His outreach is a negotiation, not a reunion—he measures every move by what it yields for his family unit.
• Class-conscious and snobbish: Obsessed with social class, he scorns Simon’s “new money” vulgarity (personalized plates, gaudy decor) and flatters himself as the custodian of “innate” taste—moral superiority masquerading as aesthetic discernment.
• Observant and cunning: Calling himself “a fairly average-looking white guy in a smart establishment,” he weaponizes invisibility. He shadows Grace for months, reconstructing her methods and motives without ever tipping his hand.
• Opportunistic and hypocritical: He despises Simon’s world yet takes its money; he condemns Grace’s violence yet allows it to proceed because it clears his path to the inheritance.
• Ruthless: On the speedboat, anger becomes action: he strikes Simon, lets him drown, and arranges the “accident.” He ends by blackmailing Grace, proving that his restraint was always strategy, not ethics.
• Unremarkable exterior as camouflage: Rugged details—a twice-broken nose from rugby, “hands the size of dinner plates,” slate-grey eyes—underline how ordinary he appears, the perfect cover for extraordinary surveillance.

Character Journey

Harry’s arc is a rapid unmasking rather than a slow evolution. He begins as a dutiful son in a loving household whose world tilts after his father’s funeral, when he learns of Simon. The initial motive is prosaic—money to shore up his family—yet contact with Simon pulls him into a larger orbit of power, vulgarity, and danger. Discovering Grace triggers horror first, then fascination, then calculation: he recognizes her as both a sibling and a tool. By shadowing her crimes, he shifts from witness to silent co-conspirator, letting her eliminate obstacles he has no wish to dispatch himself. The turning point arrives on the water in St. Tropez, where a flash of fury gives way to cold design; afterward, he authors the ending Grace believed was hers, composing an email that simultaneously confesses, controls, and cages. He emerges with wealth and leverage—victory that reads less like triumph than a proof that sentiment is a liability in the Artemis world.

Key Relationships

• Simon Artemis: Biological father and moral foil. Harry is initially dazzled by proximity to power and repelled by the cruelty that comes with it. The speedboat killing completes their arc: the son rejects the father’s dominance by adopting the father’s methods—violence masked as accident—and claims the fortune that corrodes them both.

• Grace Bernard: Unknown half-sister turned fixation. Harry studies her as if she were a case file: mapping routines, decoding methods, and interpreting motives. He grants her “permission” to continue not out of mercy but calculus, then closes the trap with blackmail—affectionless kinship recast as strategic containment.

• Christopher and Lottie Hawthorne: The parents who raised him anchor his self-image. Christopher is his true father in love and memory; Lottie is cherished but, in his view, fragile—someone to protect. This protective impulse becomes the respectable alibi for his ambition, blurring devotion with self-advancement.

• Kelly McIntosh: A hired instrument. Harry pays Kelly to photograph Grace’s prison confession, converting illicit access into airtight leverage. It’s a relationship defined by utility: transactional, precise, and expendable.

Defining Moments

Harry’s turning points reveal a steady substitution of feeling with function—each step replaces moral hesitation with tactical clarity.

• Discovering his parentage (Chapter 16): A slip at Christopher’s funeral forces the truth from Lottie: Simon is his biological father. Why it matters: grief becomes a gateway to ambition, reorienting Harry from mourning son to calculating heir.
• Shadowing Grace’s murders (Chapter 16): He witnesses Andrew’s death, later Lee’s, and recognizes the architecture of her plan. Why it matters: observation becomes complicity—his inaction is an active choice to benefit from the bloodshed.
• Killing Simon (Chapter 18): Provoked on a St. Tropez speedboat, Harry strikes with a wine bottle and lets Simon drown, staging an accident. Why it matters: the mask of passivity drops; he proves willing to do the “final” violence himself when it secures power cleanly.
• The email revelation and blackmail (Chapters 16–18): He narrates the entire scheme to Grace after her release, attaching photos of her confession to guarantee silence. Why it matters: authorship shifts—Harry writes the last chapter, reducing Grace’s narrative to evidence in his file.

Essential Quotes

Class matters, Grace. I know it’s not the done thing to say that, but I think it’s utter madness to deny a truth just because it’s uncomfortable.
— Harry Hawthorne, Chapter 16

This credo explains both his snobbery and his method: class becomes a moral system that justifies exclusion and control. By elevating taste and hierarchy over empathy, Harry frames cruelty as clarity—an “uncomfortable truth” that permits his most self-serving choices.

I decided that I would let whatever you were doing play out. Partly, I felt that you should be allowed to right the wrongs done to you. And partly, since I’m being honest, because I weighed up what was best for me and realised that you might be doing me a favour.
— Harry Hawthorne, Chapter 16

The split rationale—thinly veiled sympathy and frank self-interest—captures his hypocrisy. He licenses Grace’s violence to soothe his conscience while ensuring the practical benefits flow to him; “letting it play out” is the language of bystander ethics masking complicity.

It had been an accident. I would never be able to plan something so hideous or carry out violence in cold blood. But I’d been sorely provoked and we all have a breaking point, don’t we? I didn’t know that I was going to let him die, truly I didn’t. It all just sort of happened, as though I was watching it from a slight distance.
— Harry Hawthorne, Chapter 18

Harry clings to the rhetoric of accident to preserve his self-image as rational, not monstrous. The “slight distance” suggests both dissociation and design: a man narrating himself into innocence while meticulously managing the aftermath.

So you see, this must be where your journey ends. You cannot kill me, because the history of your crimes will be released immediately... We’ve both been through a lot at the hands of the Artemis family but between us, we’re free now. And it might not look exactly how you’d hoped, but you still won. We won.
— Harry Hawthorne, Chapter 18

This is victory as leverage. Harry rebrands coercion as shared freedom, folding Grace into a collective “we” that disguises his domination. The promise that “we won” is the final manipulation: a moral receipt offered in place of remorse.