The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant

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The World's Greatest Detective
and Her Just Okay Assistant

by
Liza Tully

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
Author:	Liza Tully
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2025
Length:	385 pages
Availability:	The World's Greatest Detective and [...] - US
	The World's Greatest Detective and [...] - UK
	The World's Greatest Detective and [...] - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B- : plods along decently enough, but manages little more

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	.	18/4/2025	.

From the Reviews:

"Tully juggles a near-overload of characters and red herrings, but she pulls it off, largely thanks to Olivia's spirited first-person narration and the book's focus on her fraught mentor/mentee relationship with Aubrey." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant is narrated by that 'just okay assistant', Olivia Blunt, and begins with her hiring-interview (which she arrives (one minute) late to, and which doesn't seem to go particularly well -- though obviously well enough, since she gets the job). Olivia's previous job was as fact-checker for an online news bureau, and now she is: "an assistant to the most famous PI in America !" Aubrey Merritt. The New York City-based Merritt Investigation Agency apparently specializes in high-profile crimes, but it isn't much of an apprenticeship for Olivia at first, with her spending almost all her time answering the phone and the like.
       Finally, there's a case where Olivia's skills -- or at least her driver's license -- are called for, the investigation into a woman's death in Vermont. Olivia tells Merritt that she wants to help with the actual investigation, and so she gets a bit of a crack at the case as well.
       The dead woman is Victoria Summersworth, and the client her daughter Haley. The police have concluded that it was suicide -- Victoria fell from her balcony, after celebrating her sixty-fifth birthday --, but Haley is convinced that it was murder. Victoria was the second wife of Warren -- who died tragically (and somewhat suspiciously ...) in a sailing accident; Warren had been fifty-one to Victoria's thirty when they married, and brought two children into the marriage, Neil and Lauren; Warren and Victoria had two more, Scott and Haley. The family owns and runs the "highbrow Wild Goose Resort" -- though not everyone is thrilled with what Victoria has done with it, Lauren complaining: "seven hundred gorgeous acres turned into a Disneyland of bad taste, with hordes of strangers tearing around in golf carts like they owned the place". For the past few years, Scott -- who has had some drug-addiction issues -- has been the general manager of the resort -- but apparently there are some financial irregularities at the otherwise successful-seeming business.
       Victoria also had a new beau, Monty Draper, a somewhat dubious bridge champion, who had proposed marriage -- though she doesn't seem to have given him an answer before she died.
       Olivia gets to tag along as Merritt does the rounds, of the (possible-)crime scene, as well as talking to all those who might provide some insight into what happened -- including coming to an arrangement with the local police. From the first, there's the question of whether it was murder or suicide -- though, just in case, Tully does toss in an absolutely clear-cut (and gruesome) murder in later along the way. There are, of course, quite a few family secrets -- and a long list of suspects, from which it is almost impossible to strike anyone: there are possible motives galore, and practically no one has a really solid alibi.
       Olivia has also left her actor-fiancé in New York, and there's a bit of tension there; he's relatively understanding -- about her possibly missing his show, for example -- but distance, and Olivia constantly putting off calling her future mother-in-law, makes for conflicted feelings and a sense of guilt, weighing on Olivia's mind as she helps work the case.
       The title of the novel, and the claim that, aside from being the 'world's greatest detective' Merritt is also: "the most famous PI in America" set the bar pretty high here, but for the most part Merritt remains quite a cipher for Olivia (and, as a consequence, the reader). There's little background Olivia can offer or unearth -- among the limited information readers get is that: "back in the eighties she'd been an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before some kind of dustup there got her fired", but that doesn't prove relevant here (and we learn nothing more about it) -- and Merritt also tries, quite successfully, to keep her private life private. As to her detecting-skills, Merritt's questioning of possible witnesses and suspects in the interviews Olivia sits in on don't seem remarkably penetrating or sharp. Meanwhile, Olivia proves herself an 'okay' assistant, most of the time -- though she does tend to jump rather easily to conclusions, and speaks up rather more often than an assistant probably should.
       For much of the novel, The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant plods along as Olivia recounts pretty much her every step, with and without Merritt. There are suspects and motives left and right., and then that bonus murder muddying the waters. Then, towards the end, Tully switches gears some. First, after playing fair with readers so long, she falls back on the tired, unrevealed cliffhanger chapter ending twist:

I opened my laptop and pulled up the photo labeled "The Bungalow." I scrolled to Victoria's datebook, then to July twenty-ninth, the day of her party.
And there it was. The missing link.

She doesn't mention there what she sees on the computer, and the next chapter has her jumping into action, the information still not revealed -- an annoying coyness when otherwise throughout Olivia had been consistently straightforward and (true to her name) blunt. (This chapter-ending-tease -- that's then left dangling, unrevealed for too long -- is annoying enough in any mystery, but even more so when it comes out of the blue as it does here, in a narrative that hadn't pulled this sort of thing before.)
Tully pulls out an even more tired mystery-standard for the denouement, as, as Merritt tells Olivia:

The reading of the will is scheduled for this morning at ten o'clock. To avoid disrupting the resort's normal business, it will take place at the Bungalow. All the relevant parties will be there, as will Detective Jim Clemmons and a cadre of officers. I'll name Victoria's murderer then.

       This approach may be familiar from old mystery novels and 1970s TV detective shows, but surely is not how things should be (or generally are) done: surely the police should simply be informed and the guilty party arrested. No need for a show. (Before this happens Olivia also gets herself in a spot of considerable trouble where the obvious course of action would also be to immediately contact the police, but she failed to do so.) But Tully wants to give Merritt a chance to put on a dramatic show -- indeed, the first chapter after the reading of the will is titled: 'Aubrey Merritt Takes the Stage', and then, in front of a captive audience, for several chapters after that she goes through the investigative process and how she reached her conclusion -- before finally revealing the guilty party.
       It's a strange narrative switch. Olivia is still narrating, and comments some along the way as Merritt does her spiel, but basically all the aspects of the case are now presented by Merritt. It's a decent enough summing-up, but makes more of a case for Merritt's showmanship than her supposed detecting-brilliance .
       As for the resolution of the case itself -- it's fine. Tully juggles a lot of suspects, and does resort a bit much to bursts of anger from many of them -- there are lots of chips on lots of shoulders here --, but there's a decent little twist regarding the note that was found when Victoria died, and while readers aren't given enough information to figure out who the killer is on their own, the explanations are satisfying enough.
       Merritt also diagnoses some of Olivia's weaknesses -- "Your starry-eyed idealism will be a liability. So will your empathy" -- though really it's that Olivia isn't much of a deep thinker and readily jumps to conclusions without sufficient foundations that would seem to be more problematic. Ultimately, Merritt grades Olivia's work on the case a C+ -- "The C is for basic competence. The plus indicates hope" -- which is a tad generous; indeed, one is left thinking that the world's greatest detective really could hire someone more capable. As to the humor-factor of Olivia's mediocrity, Tully doesn't play that out nearly as much as she might have -- the idea of a 'just okay assistant' has good potential which is under-utilized here.
       The back-in-New-York domestic elements -- Olivia and her fiancé (and his mother), and their upcoming wedding -- feel more like padding than anything else, but, like Merritt's background, presumably are meant to provide some foundation for later installments in what is surely meant to be a series (as the publisher's publicity page presents the novel as: 'Part of A Merritt & Blunt Mystery').
       There's decent potential to much of The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant, but the novel itself feels too obviously (and simply) constructed on familiar mystery elements, and the writing and the characters are too lacking in nuance to lift it beyond that.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 June 2025

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Links:

The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant:

Berkley publicity page
Q & A at Fresh Fiction

Reviews:

Liza Tully:

Official site

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

American author Liza Tully (actually: Elisabeth Brink) was born in 1956.

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