In Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Grandest Game, a handpicked roster of heirs, outsiders, and strategists descends on Hawthorne House to play a high-stakes puzzle competition where secrets are currency. Three point-of-view players drive the story, but every contender brings a motive—and a history—that complicates alliances and escalates rivalries. Family legacies, buried truths, and the rules of the game collide, forcing each character to decide what they’re willing to sacrifice to win.
Main Characters
Lyra Catalina Kane
Lyra Catalina Kane is a sharp, guarded college student who enters the Grandest Game to save her family’s ancestral home, Mile’s End—and to outrun the trauma of witnessing her biological father’s suicide. Living with aphantasia, she navigates the world through words, feelings, and patterns rather than mental images, which makes her a lightning-fast reader and a gifted decoder of puzzles and people. Forced onto a team with Grayson Hawthorne, the Hawthorne heir who once dismissed her plea for answers, she confronts both their shared past and the Hawthorne family’s entanglement with her father. Lyra’s arc moves from isolation and self-protection to hard-won vulnerability, as she learns that trusting others does not diminish her strength—it multiplies it.
Gigi Grayson
Gigi Grayson (Juliet) is a brilliantly chaotic, relentlessly optimistic twin who enters the game to define herself outside her family’s shadow. She carries a devastating secret about her father’s death that distances her from her twin, Savannah Grayson, and feeds her determination to succeed on her own merits. On a team with Brady Daniels and Knox Landry, she’s drawn to Brady’s quiet brilliance and repeatedly clashes with Knox’s abrasive pragmatism—only to find herself knotted into their shared, dangerous history. Gigi’s journey reframes her “chaos” as a superpower, proving that unconventional thinking and radical joy can be as formidable as discipline or ruthlessness.
Rohan
Rohan is a charming, lethal strategist exiled from the Devil’s Mercy, an elite London club that raised him to treat information as leverage and affection as a liability. Playing to buy his way back in and reclaim his inheritance, he views people as assets and the game as a battlefield of manipulation and long cons. Paired with Savannah, whose icy control and ambition match his own, he enters a chess match of attraction and suspicion that challenges his creed of ruthless self-interest. Rohan’s arc tests whether he is only the sum of his training—or whether partnership, even imperfectly, can become purpose.
Supporting Characters
Grayson Hawthorne
Grayson Hawthorne is the Hawthorne heir conditioned to command: controlled, exacting, and allergic to vulnerability. Publicly the non-player running logistics, he’s revealed as the secret eighth entrant and becomes Lyra’s reluctant teammate, forcing him to confront his own rigidity and the fallout of past choices. Protective of his half-sisters Gigi and Savannah, he begins practicing the unfamiliar art of being wrong—opening the door to connection, risk, and change.
Savannah Grayson
Savannah Grayson is an elite athlete with a precision-hard persona whose hidden objective is vengeance against Avery Grambs, whom she blames for her father’s death. Partnered with Rohan, she meets a strategist who sees through her armor and recognizes the fury beneath her composure. Savannah’s story asks whether all-consuming revenge eclipses every other identity—or whether she can choose a future not dictated by rage.
Brady Daniels
Brady Daniels is a quiet prodigy with a near-photographic memory and deep expertise in symbols and languages, playing to protect the few people he trusts. Bound by a broken brotherhood with Knox and the unsolved disappearance of Calla Thorp, he’s forced into proximity that reopens old wounds. His arc pivots on whether he can risk trust again—with Knox, with Gigi, and with himself.
Knox Landry
Knox Landry is a hard-edged pragmatist who believes winning justifies any method, a worldview calcified by trauma tied to Brady and Calla. Sponsored by Calla’s father, Orion Thorp, he weaponizes cynicism to keep everyone at arm’s length. Knox’s story weighs whether the armor that once kept him alive is now keeping him from redemption.
Odette Morales
Odette Morales is the game’s eldest player—an actress-lawyer chameleon whose frailty masks a razor-edged mind—and the teammate who subtly steers Lyra and Grayson. Dying and on her own clock, she carries a history with patriarch Tobias Hawthorne and parcels out truths like tests. Odette plays to close a ledger, not just to win a prize.
Avery Grambs
Avery Grambs is the Hawthorne heiress and architect of the Grandest Game, a benevolent but opaque overseer who turns puzzles into crucibles. Balancing fortune, legacy, and love, she designs challenges that force players to choose between ambition and integrity. Her presence refracts the Hawthornes’ power while inviting outsiders to challenge it.
Jameson Hawthorne
Jameson Hawthorne is the thrill-chasing emcee whose charisma and appetite for risk electrify the competition. Devoted to Avery, he delights in spectacle but also understands how to push players past their limits—sometimes for their own good, sometimes just for the rush.
Nash Hawthorne
Nash Hawthorne is the steady eldest brother, a grounded counterweight to the family’s chaos. He provides pragmatic guidance and emotional ballast while keeping a watchful eye on fault lines others miss.
Xander Hawthorne
Xander Hawthorne is the inventive youngest brother whose engineering brain and love of chaos shape the game’s playful-meets-perilous design. He leavens tension with humor, but his puzzles still demand nerve and ingenuity.
Minor Characters
- Calla Thorp: The missing girl at the center of Brady and Knox’s shared trauma, whose absence drives their deepest conflicts and choices.
- The Proprietor: The Devil’s Mercy’s calculating leader and Rohan’s mentor-antagonist, embodying the club’s creed that affection is leverage and weakness unforgivable.
- Sheffield Grayson: Gigi and Savannah’s late father; his attempt on Avery’s life and subsequent death fuel Savannah’s revenge and Gigi’s secret.
- The Watcher: A shadowy figure with a past tie to Gigi who calls her “sunshine” and works for a dangerous woman named Eve, hinting at threats beyond the game.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The heart of the novel is the push-pull between control and connection. Lyra and Grayson start as reluctant allies—her need for answers rubs against his instinct to manage—but shared danger and Odette’s nudges force them to confront the Hawthorne–Kane tangle and their own guardedness. In parallel, Rohan and Savannah form a partnership built on mirrored ambition and mutual appraisal; attraction complicates the calculus as each tests how far the other will go. Gigi, placed between Brady’s quiet loyalty and Knox’s weaponized cynicism, becomes the catalyst who exposes the lie that either man can outrun the past.
Family ties shape the battlefield. The Hawthorne brothers operate as a unit—Jameson’s showmanship, Nash’s steadiness, Xander’s ingenuity, and Grayson’s command—while Avery’s design choices press players to reveal character under pressure. The Grayson twins fracture under the weight of secrets: Savannah’s anger and Gigi’s concealment distort their bond even as love persists beneath.
Team configurations crystallize alliances and fault lines:
- Team Heart (Lyra, Grayson, Odette): Defined by buried history and strategic candor, this trio forces private hurts into the open as part of play.
- Team Diamond (Rohan, Savannah): A volatile power pair who treat partnership like chess, each measuring trust against advantage.
- Team Club (Gigi, Brady, Knox): A pressure cooker where an old disappearance and a broken brotherhood dictate present moves—until Gigi’s unorthodox brilliance resets the game.
Across teams, the central tension is whether trust can survive a contest engineered to reward betrayal—and whether choosing connection is itself the grandest win.