Author Rachel Hawkins’ catalog of thrillers is intriguingly unpredictable. Though her stories consistently feature compelling female characters, fast-paced plots, and plentiful twists, the subjects differ widely. The Wife Upstairs is essentially a Jane Eyre retelling. Reckless Girls has serious And Then There Were None vibes. The Villa is a 1970s-style take on the famous real-life summer at Villa Dodati that created Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that her latest novel, titled The Heiress, is no different.
A deliciously entertaining Southern Gothic tale of buried family secrets, long-held grudges, overt manipulation, greed, and murder, The Heiress isn’t necessarily what you would call groundbreaking fiction, but man, is it a good time. Bouncing between multiple time periods and POVs, the story delves deep into the family drama of a well-known North Carolina heiress and her descendants, telling her story through letters, newspaper clippings, society notices, and much more. And while regular thriller readers will likely clock some of Hawkins’s surprises early, the novel’s furiously propulsive pace will almost surely keep you turning pages well into the night.
The Heiress follows the story of Camden McTavish, an English teacher living in Colorado who receives a phone call summoning him back to the family estate after his adopted mother’s death. Because Camden is the sole heir of the infamous Ruby MacTavish, one of the richest—and most notorious—women in North Carolina. Kidnapped as a child and presumed dead until she was miraculously returned to the family who thought they had lost her forever, she went on to marry four men who all died under somewhat suspicious circumstances and wield sole control over a vast family fortune.
Camden, for his part, left his family behind a long time ago and hasn’t been back to the family estate of Ashby House in years. But the combined efforts of his wife Jules and a North Carolina cousin convince him to return if only to hash out the details of Ruby’s will and get the cousins—along with their suspect business ideas—off his back. But when Camden and Jules arrive back at the family estate, things don’t go as planned. As Camden begins to revert to the worst, pettiest version of himself, Jules begins to wonder what life might be like as lady of the manor, and the resentment of the other McTavish family members frequently boils over into outright rage. (Let’s just say they’re not thrilled that Ruby left the massive family fortune to someone who isn’t even a blood relative.) And long-held family secrets of all stripes begin to bubble their way to the surface.
Told in alternating POVs between Camden and Jules, interspersed with a series of confessional-style letters from Ruby herself, the slow unraveling of complex family vendettas and intense competition for the legacy—both financial and otherwise—that the titular heiress leaves behind is well-plotted and propulsive. The story is dripping with Gothic tropes and themes, and Hawkins smartly never asks you to pretend any of the folks in this story are good people, let alone someone any of us ought to root for.
All that said, it’s virtually impossible to read this book nd not come away loving Ruby in some shape or form. Hawkins herself told us last year that her books are often about “exploring what happens when you push women into corners. The extremes they’ll go to to free themselves, to fight back.” And the character of Ruby epitomizes this statement to a tee. Selfish, cruel, and occasionally dead inside, she’s no one’s hero. But she’s no one’s victim, either, and her determination to mold her life to suit her own desires is, in its occasionally dark and uncomfortable way, really fun and satisfying to watch. It doesn’t hurt that she’s also the book’s most entertainingly dark POV character, and the sly, sharp-edged commentary is a real highlight.
One of the best things about The Heiress is that every single character in it—even Ruby herself, whose letters allow us to see the complicated, difficult woman she really was—-is an unreliable narrator. Virtually no one is who they initially appear to be on the surface, and almost all of them are some flavor of terrible person. I don’t mean that as an insult, by the way, it’s delightful—but this is also a story where everyone is some degree of liar, and most of its major players are willing to lie, cheat, betray, or even kill to get what they want. It’s generally impossible to know whose version of events to believe right up until the novel’s final pages. (Though you’ll likely be able to make some fairly educated guesses.) But even if you manage to figure out some of the novel’s secrets, it doesn’t make its ending any less satisfying—or fun to watch unfold.
The Heiress is available now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB