When the only thing I can think of "I'm glad it's over" then I guess the series wasn't that good, was it?

Honestly I'm annoyed at the entire thing because I feel like I wasted my time. I see I've given the second book four stars and I can't for the life of me remember why because I know for a fact I was extremely disappointed in all three books. The only reason I even finished any of them was because it was a buddy read with a friend.

Let's start with the good - the premise of the series is amazing, so it being really popular is absolutely no surprise to me. The puzzles - great, really interesting. But the bad.. the bad made me really hate ever hearing about the series.

The execution of the story just fell SO flat. The "romance" was absolute horseshit. There was no chemistry between Avery-Jameson OR Avery-Grayson. Their interactions in this book made NO SENSE. Most of my notes on my e-reader about their interactions consist of "huh?" because they were just so confusing. Jameson's insistence that Avery really wanted Grayson, his dramatics about wanting to be a DiFfErEnT MaN for her and protect her from harm (read: control her and lock her up) because she's just that good, Grayson's constant wallowing about Emily (who was an absolute turd of a person, hated every second of having to hear about her, so good riddance) and how he's broken and weak and not worth anything - give me a fucking break with the theatrics already.
All of the characters, with the exception of Xander who I actually liked, either make no sense or are deeply unlikeable and hard to give a shit about.

At some point in the story, I got just exhausted with all the twists and turns and I felt like the story itself was a damn Rube Goldberg machine - unnecessarily complicated. It felt like the author tried to be super clever and thought that the more twists she included, the better, but it only managed to overwhelm and annoy me. I also couldn't make sense of the characters' ages and I feel like something is not adding up there.

The ending was really predictable, not to mention unrealistic.

When you inherit a fortune, you don't inherit it all in plain money, it's tied up in assets, so her giving it away makes no sense.

And don't even get me started on that foundation name. It's just as bad as, if not even worse than, Renesmee or Edward Jacob. I mean jesus christ.

As for writing, I absolutely DESPISE how the author cuts up direct speech. It really messes with the flow of reading and it makes no sense to insert comments IN THE MIDDLE of direct speech.