The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tully, a pseudonym for A Taste of Power author Elisabeth Elo, moves from thrillers to cozy territory with this amusing fair-play mystery. Olivia Blunt, a 25-year-old former fact-checker for an online news bureau, has come to the Gramercy Park apartment of 60-year-old Aubrey Merritt, the most famous PI in America, with hopes of snagging a position as her assistant. Impressed by Olivia's sleuthing bona fides, the imperious Aubrey agrees to take her on. The pair's first client is Haley Summersworth, whose mother, Victoria, died from an early-morning fall from her balcony after celebrating her 65th birthday at a resort she owned on Vermont's Lake Champlain. The Burlington police assume Victoria died by suicide, but Haley doesn't buy it. Soon, a skeptical Aubrey and determined Olivia are off to Vermont, where suspects abound, including resort employees and Victoria's society friends. 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. Readers will be eager for a sequel.
