The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant (A Merritt & Blunt Mystery) by Liza Tully Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, mystery
Series: Merritt & Blunt #1
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on July 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A great detective's young assistant yearns for glory, but first they have learn to get along in this delightful feel good mystery.
Olivia Blunt doesn't want to be an assistant detective for the rest of her life. She's determined to learn everything she can from her mentor and renowned investigator, Aubrey Merritt, but the latter is no easy grader.
After weeks of fielding phone calls from parties desperate for the world-renowned detective’s help, a case comes across Olivia’s desk that just might be worthy of Merritt’s skills. On the evening of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police have ruled it a suicide, but her daughter Haley thinks it was murder.
Merritt is ever the skeptic, but Olivia believes Haley. Plus, she’s desperate to prove her investigative skills to her aloof boss. But the Summersworth family drama is a complicated web.
Olivia realizes she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing... or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one she’d started with.
My Review:
This one grabbed me by the title. No, seriously, when I saw that title I had to see what the actual story was all about. And what a story it is!
Aubrey Merritt, at least in this 21st century setting, IS the world’s greatest detective. Whether others have held that title before her, or will afterwards, at this moment in time, she’s definitely it. Really, truly.
That she seems like the love child, or at least the book baby, of Sherlock Holmes at his most condescending and that Devil who wore Prada – with the ego and the manners to match – just adds to her reputation and makes her that much more formidable when she’s on the case.
But this isn’t actually Merritt’s story – not that we don’t get hints of what made her the irascible but effective private detective that she is today.
This is Olivia Blunt’s story. Olivia is that ‘just okay assistant’ of the title. Which is actually a step up from what Olivia believes her new boss thinks of her – and not without some justification.
Olivia, former fact-checker for an unnamed news organization, begins her first mystery with her knees knocking, already on the back foot for being one whole minute late, interviewing for her dream job as Merritt’s assistant. The interview is NOT going well – or so it seems from Olivia’s impostor syndrome tinted point of view.
But she gets the job anyway. Quite possibly because Merritt is extremely difficult to work for – putting it very, very mildly. She’s not actually mean, but she’s frequently both demanding AND demeaning. To her clients as well as to her ‘just okay’ assistant. And she goes through assistants like tissue paper – for any image of that description you care to imagine.
All of which comes into play on their first actual case together, after Merritt is hired by the grieving daughter of Victoria Summersworth, owner of a beautiful – and exclusive – resort on Vermont’s Lake Champlain.
Haley Summersworth can’t accept the way that the police have taken the easy way out of ruling her mother’s death a suicide. Her mother was happy, healthy and making plans for the future right up until the moment she died. Something about the verdict is not right. Plausible, but not right. Haley wants answers – in spite of her family’s willingness to accept the conclusion the police have come to.
What Haley doesn’t count on – and what Olivia Blunt doesn’t expect – is that a murder investigation turns over a lot of rocks in the lives of every single person even on the periphery of the case. The ugly things that crawl out from under those rocks are going to crawl over everyone’s lives – whether they are guilty or innocent of anything at all. Nothing will ever be the same – especially their relationships.
And neither will Olivia Blunt, the just okay assistant, whose heart is a bit too open and accepting – while her eyes aren’t nearly as wide open as they need to be. This case will be just the beginning of the making of her – if she just manages to live long enough to learn from it.
Escape Rating B: At first, I thought this was a debut novel – but it’s not. The author has previously written dark thrillers under the name Elisabeth Elo and literary fiction as Elisabeth Panttaja Brink. So not a debut author, but still first in a new direction and a series.
For the first book in a series, this does a terrific job of both setting up the characters and telling the story of their first real case. I’m a bit on the fence about it being truly cozy, as the case is a sordid mess that reminds me a LOT of Moonflower Murders, possibly with a touch of Knives Out. While the relationship between Merritt and Blunt is anything but cozy or even properly master and apprentice.
What this is, however, is a traditional mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Mystery, updated to a contemporary setting. Complete with the traditional gathering of the suspects for the big reveal at the end – along with one final twist in the tale.
An ending that has more than enough threads and layers that, while I saw some of it coming, I certainly didn’t see all of it coming until that big finish.
I’m also facepalming a bit at the series title, a Merritt and Blunt Mystery, because their names are a really big clue about their characters and their relationship. Aubrey Merritt expects her assistants to find their way because of their ‘merit’ – their ability to follow along her methods and her process with no actual teaching and very limited clues.
She’s also extremely ‘blunt’, both to her assistant and to her clients, in a way that should get her tossed out on her ear an awful lot, but mostly doesn’t because tossing a well-dressed 60-something woman out of anywhere physically is going to look bad for whoever does it. Whether Merritt deserves it or not.
The case is very much Moonflower Murders, in that it takes place on a family owned and operated resort, that there are lot of seething resentments and family rivalries lurking just under the surface, that there is a lot of money at stake, and that Olivia Blunt at least knows about as much about what she’s doing as an investigator as Susan Ryeland does.
In the end, I had a lot of fun with this one but the partnership isn’t fully baked yet. Although, by that end Aubrey Merritt seemed a bit more like Lillian Pentecost in Fortune Favors the Dead than she did The Devil Wears Prada, particularly her unwillingness to admit her own weaknesses and her testiness when those weaknesses get poked. Which leads this reader to the sense that the relationship between Merritt and Blunt has room and respect to grow into.
Finally, I have questions about the viability of Olivia’s romantic relationship back home with her fiance because that felt a bit tacked on to the story. Leaving this reader curious to see where both those relationships – and the investigations – go in later books in the series. I’m looking forward to reading them.
