Breakaway Books

Authored by Liza Tully; Published July 2025; Mystery

⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

In The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant, stereotypes are king. Before reading the novel, I assumed that the title was tongue-in-cheek, and that the assistant would rise above her role as Gen Z lackey. But… it never quite happened.

The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant follows Olivia Blunt as she takes on her dream job as assistant to the semi-elderly famous private inspector Aubrey Merritt. Merritt and Blunt are called to upstate New York to investigate the supposed suicide of Victoria Summerfield and quickly discover a rather large trove of family drama surrounding the Summerfields. Drug addiction, embezzlement, and a multitude of romantic affairs swirl around Victoria’s family and businesses, but it’s up to Olivia and Aubrey to find out if any of it led to murder.

While I understand that Merritt and Blunt are meant to be modeled upon Holmes and Watson, I couldn’t help but feel that the author didn’t pull off the duo’s charm. Yes, Holmes is prickly at best and a jerk at worst, but in all the renditions I’ve seen of him, he has had some warmth and something redeeming beneath his superiority and unfeeling nature. Merritt seems to be arrogant, perhaps racist, and completely insensitive to the humanity of those around her. I kept waiting for a reveal that would somehow make her more sympathetic to the reader, but nothing of the sort appeared. If anything, Merritt got worse as the book continued, concluding by publicly humiliating her assistant.

None of which is to say that Olivia makes it easy to root for her, either. From the first page, it is evident that her greatest aspiration is to be a detective, and yet she is remarkably devoid of even the most common sense to apply to solving mysteries. Basic curiosity and critical thinking elude her, and she makes absolutely wild leaps to conclusions that are far-fetched to say the least. In her attempts to impress Merritt, Olivia continually prioritizes her job over her romantic relationship and impending marriage, and yet, she never faces the consequences. There’s no payoff where the tension of putting her fiance second comes to fruition. She treads happily through life with everything working out in her favor, and that was unsatisfying to me as a reader.

You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about the mystery within the novel in this review. It’s fine, with an ample helping of rich people drama, but nothing to write home about, and truthfully, it didn’t make nearly as much of an impression on me as the main characters. And perhaps that is all you need to know about The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant.