Books
The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. She’s eager to become a valued contributor to the great detective’s work, but Merritt is a difficult, exacting boss, and the learning curve is steep.
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 secrets, lies, and buried 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.
Q&A
After writing dark suspense novels, what made you decide to write a light-hearted murder mystery?
My last novel was a grim thriller set in Siberia, and after being immersed in some of the bleakest topics imaginable, my spirit needed a sunny day. Traditional murder mysteries are what I turn to when I want to smile.
There’s a lot to love in this insanely popular genre. I love that they paint human nature, not always in stark black and white, but mostly in its many shades of gray—which is why so many of their characters, ordinary people in most respects, can yet be considered suspects. I love that they end with a solution, acknowledging the timeless truth that a story, any story, isn’t ever really finished until its conflicts have been resolved, and I love how they nudge me to emulate the tenacious detective, who puts her mind toward her goal with a cool head and unflagging confidence, no matter how impossible her challenge appears to be at first. What’s more—and this may be the most important thing—murder mysteries are fun. Who doesn’t enjoy trying to solve a good puzzle (as long as the author has played fair, which I promise I did)?
There are many other wonderful ways that murder mysteries work their magic, and I can’t take credit for any of them. I’m just one of many writers happily traipsing down the road that Agatha Christie and others paved, trying my best to make good, responsible use of the brilliant conventions they devised, while, I hope, offering an interesting view of our modern world along the way.
What did you most enjoy about writing THE WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE AND HER JUST OKAY ASSISTANT?
I loved writing about my two main characters—Boomer Aubrey Merritt and Gen-Zer Olivia Blunt—and I hope you will enjoy them too. They grew up in different eras, come from different social classes, and have very different temperaments and abilities. They share a strong commitment to solving mysteries, but they approach the work in very different ways. Olivia, a rookie, is imaginative, empathic, and often impractical. Aubrey, a celebrated private investigator with decades of experience, is rational, shrewd, and occasionally cold-hearted. It’s no surprise that their relationship tends to be rocky.
What neither character cares to admit (but their author understands quite well) is how much they need each other. As she grudgingly approaches retirement age, Aubrey experiences an unexpected urge to pass on to a worthy acolyte the precious expertise she worked so hard to attain over her long career. And Olivia desperately needs the master’s tutelage if she is going to realize her childhood dream of becoming a great detective herself someday.
On their first case together, their relationship almost implodes. Aubrey starts to doubt that Olivia has what it takes to truly be her successor. And Olivia realizes that she really doesn’t want to be, nor could ever become, a carbon copy of her boss. How this mismatched pair work together is as much a part of the story as how they (almost don’t) solve the murder.