A Merritt & Blunt Mystery: Book 1
Publication Date: July 8, 2025
A brilliant Boomer detective and her ambitious Gen Z assistant try to get along in this delightful feel-good mystery.
Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. She longs to become a valued contributor to the great detective’s work, but Merritt is a difficult, exacting boss, and the learning curve is steeper than she expected.
After weeks of boring computer work, Olivia is finally invited to join Merritt on an important case. On the night of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police ruled her death a suicide, but Victoria’s daughter Haley thinks it was murder.
Merritt and Olivia soon discover that the Summersworth family is complicated web of lies, ambitions, and resentments. As the list of suspects grows, Olivia makes one apparent mistake after another. When she blunders into a truly dangerous situation, she realizes Merritt might be right: she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing…or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one they started with.
Olivia Blunt’s dream job of being the assistant to the amazing Aubrey Merritt, detective extraordinaire, isn’t exactly what she thought. But when a woman reaches out believing her mother has been murdered, Olivia sees her chance to prove her worth in The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant by Liza Tully.
Olivia Blunt decides to chase her dream of becoming a famous detective by working for the legendary Aubrey Merritt. But her dreams are more of a nightmare. Merritt doesn’t include Olivia much, expecting her to answer phones and do a little online digging. But when a call comes in from a distraught woman claiming her mother’s suicide is more than meets the eye, Olivia sees her opportunity to prove herself.
Victoria Summersworth was the life of the party, celebrating her 65th birthday with 100 of her closest friends. The next morning, she is found dead, seemingly having thrown herself from her balcony. But the clues do not fully match this explanation, and Merritt is ready to find out the truth, reluctantly, with Olivia’s help. An abundance of suspects emerges, and more than one mystery needs to be solved. Will Olivia prove her worth, or is she out of her depth?
I was intrigued by the title of this book, and the description drew me in. From the description, I believed this to be a full mystery, along the lines of Sherlock Holmes. However, this story did lean heavily into the cozy realm. I expected to read more about Aubrey Merritt digging in and solving the mystery. However, the book instead followed only Olivia, with small moments of her and Merritt working together. Merritt was incredibly rude throughout the novel, which is often a trope of the savant detective. But she didn’t have the same draw that you could see with other detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes. She came across as someone I would not want to work with or hire, for that matter. It made it hard for me to connect with the characters. I also found the ending dragged on for far too long. It had that classic cozy mystery five-chapter explanation of the murder going through every single person and how they could be the killer before finally telling the truth. Of course, the murderer confesses because we needed a perfect bow on this story.
The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant is a comical and cozy mystery that will delight those looking for a mystery to read with a cup of tea.
Liza Tully is a pseudonym for Elisabeth Brink, who writes dark thrillers under the name Elisabeth Elo, as well as literary fiction under the name Elisabeth Panttaja Brink.
