The Hawthorne Legacy characters

Appears from the start

The heir to the Hawthorne fortune, still a high school student, still living under guard in a house full of people who did not choose her. A year of the family's games has made her a match for the brothers, but only two questions matter to her: where Toby Hawthorne is, and why a man she never met left her everything he had.

Appears from the start

The third Hawthorne brother, reckless and quick, happiest with a puzzle in front of him and something at stake. He and Avery are playing his grandfather's last game together, and he treats the search for his uncle as the next round of it.

Appears from the start

The second Hawthorne brother, raised to inherit an empire that is no longer his, holding himself to a code that leaves no room for wanting what his brother has. Controlled to the point of rigidity, he puts everything into being useful, and he begins looking into the biological father he has never met.

Also known as Xander

Appears from the start

The youngest Hawthorne brother, cheerful, inventive, and constitutionally unable to leave a machine or a person unimproved. He is the brother most openly on Avery's side.

Appears from the start

The oldest Hawthorne brother and the family's fixer, drawn to anyone who needs looking after and uninterested in the money itself. He has attached himself to Libby's welfare.

Appears from the start

Avery's older half-sister and legal guardian, adjusting to security details and household staff after years of scraping by. Out from under the boyfriend who dominated her, she is working out who she is when nobody is taking advantage of her.

Also known as Harry

Appears from the start

Tobias Hawthorne's son, believed dead for twenty years and in fact living rough under another name, the chess player Avery befriended without knowing who he was. He has disappeared again, and finding him is the question that drives the book.

Also known as John Oren

Appears from the start

Avery's head of security, formerly Tobias Hawthorne's, who treats the previous year as proof that he was right to trust nobody inside the house or outside it.

Appears from the start

Avery's lawyer, managing an estate, a public image, and a client who keeps choosing the dangerous option. Ambitious and unsentimental, with a personal history inside the Hawthorne circle she would rather not discuss.

Also known as Max

First appears in chapter 5

Avery's best friend from Connecticut, blunt and loyal, who comes to stay at Hawthorne House and supplies the only outside perspective Avery gets.

First appears in chapter 8

Tobias Hawthorne's elder daughter, still living in the house and still convinced the fortune should have stayed in the family, now managing the fallout from her sister's arrest.

First appears in chapter 10

The younger Laughlin sister, quiet and used to being overlooked, trying to build a life of her own out from under the memory of Emily.

First appears in chapter 12

Zara's niece by marriage, Emily Laughlin's closest friend and Xander's former girlfriend, poised and deliberately provoking, with her own reasons for staying close to the Hawthornes.

First appears in chapter 30

Grayson Hawthorne's biological father, a wealthy businessman in Phoenix with a wife and two daughters, who has built a life with no place in it for the son he never acknowledged.

First appears in chapter 88

A young woman who arrives at Hawthorne House in the closing pages, a near-double for the dead Emily Laughlin.