The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant (Merritt & Blunt Mysteries) - Hardcover

Tully, Liza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593816773 ISBN 13: 9780593816776

Verlag: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S., 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Liza Tully is a pseudonym for Elisabeth Brink, who writes dark thrillers under the name Elisabeth Elo, as well as literary fiction under the name Elisabeth Panttaja Brink.

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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.

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Chapter 1

The Interview

Aubrey Merritt opened the door. "You're late," she said.

She was tall, silver-haired, formidable. In her sixties and still going strong. Her eyes-a vivid dark blue-bored into me with such ferocious concentration that I had to suppress an urge to run.

Still panting, I checked my watch. "By one minute. One minute only."

"That counts as late."

"Technically, I suppose, but-" Don't argue, I told myself. This is your dream-job interview. At least try to be agreeable. I plastered a nice smile on my face and said, "Of course. I'm so sorry."

Her eyes narrowed. "I don't like apologies. They're usually insincere, which yours clearly was."

I caught myself before I apologized again. The interview was deteriorating faster than it had any right to. I needed to turn it around quickly. Perhaps if the nationally renowned private investigator knew the reason for my very slight tardiness . . . ?

"I'm not usually late, at least not as a general rule," I explained. "It's just that the plumber was supposed to come this morning at nine a.m., and then at noon he called to say he was running late. If it had been anyone else, I would have canceled-I mean, if it had been the mayor of New York, I would have canceled-so as not to risk being late for this interview. But our kitchen sink has been leaking like crazy for more than a month-even when the water wasn't running!-and the landlord was no help at all. I tried to fix it myself, and so did . . . um, the guy I live with." I never knew what to call Trevor. Boyfriend was passé, partner sounded too functional, and fiancé was too French. "Nothing worked, and we've been desperate to get it fixed. I was really worried that if I told the plumber guy, Sorry, you missed the appointment; come back another day, he'd get annoyed and refuse to return at all! I thought that as long as he showed up very soon, as he assured me he would, because he was already in the neighborhood, I could wait while he fixed the sink and still make it here by two p.m. Which I did! Minus one minute, of course."

"Stop, please." Aubrey Merritt was holding up her pale white hands, palms out, as if I were aiming a gun at her. "Excuses are even worse than apologies. They tend to go on far too long, as yours just did. And the longer they go on, the less convincing they become."

I could feel my face reddening. Not convincing? Really? Anyone who'd ever experienced the scourge of a leaking sink wouldn't need convincing. First there's the constant drip, drip, drip. Then the stench of water collecting in a saucepan under the sink and sitting there (and overflowing) while you're at work. Then the job of dumping the dirty water. Where are you supposed to put it? You can't pour it down the kitchen sink, because it will just leak out again in a big rush. You can't throw it out the window of your apartment either. Try doing that on East Fourteenth Street and see how far you get! No, you have to pour it slowly down the bathroom sink or shower drain, or flush it down the toilet a little at a time, because the toilet is the most ancient fixture of all and always seems to be on the verge of giving up. Your day is thereby ruined. Now multiply that by weeks.

But as I peered past Aubrey Merritt, into the apartment where she lived and worked, I saw a possible reason why my explanation had failed to garner sympathy. The place was gorgeous and looked to be enormous. Even the foyer was huge. Its decorations included a tall Chinese-looking vase on a marble plinth, and a wall-sized, museum-quality nineteenth-century oil painting of men in a small boat harpooning a shark. And the building itself was one of the finest New York had to offer-a nine-story Gilded Age confection of brick and terra-cotta that bordered private Gramercy Park (its keys given only to near neighbors). Chances were good that Aubrey Merritt had never lived in a fourth-floor East Village walk-up with antiquated plumbing and a landlord who didn't return calls, so how could she possibly understand the desperation I'd felt and the risky calculation I'd had to make?

"Come with me," she said briskly, apparently having decided not to shut the door in my face. As I followed her down a corridor, I spied a man with the silhouette of a linebacker disappearing into a back room. I wondered what relation he had to the detective. Was he her husband? Lover? Friend? Employee?

"That's Gilbert," Aubrey Merritt said over her shoulder. She gave no further explanation, and I didn't ask for one. I was too unnerved by the ridiculous thought that she must have eyes in the back of her head.

We entered a large sunny room that I took to be her office. Crammed bookcases lined three walls. A faded Persian rug covered a portion of scuffed mahogany floor. Two old leather chairs were set on either side of a deep-cushioned couch of dark green velvet, and a single window, high and wide and gracefully bowed, looked over a garden ringed by a tall brick wall. Soaking up the cool late-April sunshine falling through this lovely window was a round oak table showcasing a collection of odd, eye-catching items: city maps, brass statuettes, an ancient South American mask, and other things.

But what really drew my attention was a wooden easel angled so that it caught the window's light. A low table next to it was home to charcoal pencils and dirty rags, and the floor surrounding it was covered with rudimentary charcoal sketches, some of them mere lines and shadings, pieces that appeared to have been ripped from the easel in dissatisfaction.

I couldn't help being drawn to one of these sketches, of a quaint ivy-covered cottage with a lush front garden in which a shadow in the shape of a man worked. Was it an actual place, I wondered, or only a fantasy? I hadn't studied it for more than a few moments when I heard a sharp cough. I looked up to find the detective waiting for me. She was seated behind a Louis XV-style writing desk with intricate inlaid wood and gold filigreed edges. The desktop was clear but for an iPad and a fluted vase filled with black-spotted tiger lilies.

Honestly, the room and everything in it had almost overwhelmed me. I could have spent an hour there by myself contentedly, simply reading the spines of the books, running my fingers along the well-aged leather of the desktop, and turning all the fascinating artifacts over in my hands. I'd grown up in a small house on a busy street in Queens. At night I'd fallen asleep to the tuneless music of nonstop traffic and the rumble of jets flying into and out of LaGuardia. It was just my dad and me in the house. He was a handyman/carpenter (no job too small), and in the entire seventeen years I'd lived with him before I went off to Queens College the decor had never once changed. Our idea of a luxury vacation was a long weekend every August in a motel on the Jersey Shore.

As Aubrey Merritt tapped her fingers on her desk impatiently, I weaved a path through the cast-off drawings and lowered myself into the armchair in front of the desk.

She picked up the iPad and settled stylish black reading glasses halfway down her nose.

"Let's see. . . . You are . . . ah, is it Laura Portman?" Her voice was low and a little rough, her cadence unhurried.

"Blunt," I supplied. "Olivia Blunt."

Frowning, she swiped an index finger, slightly bent with age, across the screen, then another and another. I imagined the job applications of dozens of more qualified applicants flying past under her fingertips.

"Oh, I see what happened. I was on the wrong day. Let's see. . . . Yes, there you are. Olivia Blunt."

A long moment of silence followed. I wondered if I should fill it with something. Gushing admiration would just embarrass us both, but I needed to let her know that I deeply and sincerely respected her, that I had never...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593816773
• ISBN 13: 9780593816776
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 387
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland