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

By Sara Steven

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. (Synopsis courtesy of Goodreads.)

The World’s Greatest Detective has some great nuances that reminded me of the TV show Hacks, particularly with its primary investigator, Aubrey. She is tough and shrewd, and won’t put up with any nonsense. She won’t give any leeway to Olivia, not if Olivia wants to be Aubrey’s assistant. When the case regarding Victoria Summersworth becomes their primary objective, it was fun to see how both women go about figuring out if Summersworth’s death was really self-inflicted, or if there was foul play involved. Aubrey is methodical and stoic, while Olivia uses intuition to factor in everything at play, making both characters push and pull against each other in the best of ways.

The synopsis indicates how complicated the Summersworth family drama can be, and that is no lie. There are a lot of elements and various relatives at play, from siblings to potential romantic partners, assistants and relatives attached to assistants. I appreciated how every suspect is detailed out nicely, so I never felt lost as to who was who. Through it all, I had my suspicions on what really happened to Victoria Summersworth, and there were some definite twists and turns along the way. The plotline didn’t make it easy, and that’s the best kind of suspenseful experience. Where you have to actually focus and think on what the eventual answer might be.

When I got about three-quarters of the way through the book, I did feel as though it was running a little longer than I’d expected it to. Maybe because I was more than ready to know for sure if my assessment was correct. But even with that, The World’s Greatest Detective was a great read, and even though the title claims that Olivia is just the okay assistant, she was definitely more than that. Both ladies were powerhouses and really made the experience!    

Thanks to Berkley for the book in exchange for an honest review.

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