It’s been said that opposites attract but they can also repel—and the resultant push and pull often has a unique, and uniquely compelling, magnetism.
Liza Tully—aliases: Elisabeth Brink, Elisabeth Elo (dark thrillers), and Elisabeth Pantajja Brink (literary fiction)—explores this dynamic in her first comedic caper, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant (Berkley; July 8, 2025). The book introduces world renowned private investigator Aubrey Merritt and her newly minted apprentice, Olivia Blunt, a formidable if fractious duo whose tenuous trust in one another is put to the test when (possible) murder comes calling.
Wealthy socialite, respected businessperson, and beloved matriarch Victoria Summersworth was found dead the morning after her sixty-fifth birthday, her body crumpled on the rocky shore of Lake Champlain, far below her home’s balcony.
And while the local authorities were quick to deem the tragedy a suicide (there was a note, after all), her daughter, Haley, is convinced that she was killed and beseeches Aubrey to take the case. Always the skeptic, the detective nevertheless agrees to investigate—necessitating a road trip to Vermont with her earnest yet inexperienced sidekick.
A comedy of terrors ensues, in which the two find themselves navigating a messy intermingling of business, family, and romance as they attempt to reconcile the discrepancies surrounding Victoria’s demise. Detached and methodical, Aubrey knows from experience that the truth will reveal itself in time.
But empathic, impetuous Olivia—whose good intentions sometimes belie bad form—feels compelled to drive the case forward in an effort to win her boss’s approval. The resultant momentum triggers both surprising revelations and acts of desperation that could have decidedly deadly consequences.
Now, the author known as Liza Tully offers a revealing glimpse into the creation of her partners in crime and their world of mystery and misunderstandings….
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John B. Valeri: Your crime-solving duo, Aubrey Merritt and Olivia Blunt, have little in common. They grew up in different eras, come from different social classes, and have very different personalities. Olivia, the rookie, is imaginative, empathic, and often impractical. Aubrey, the renowned detective, is rational, shrewd, and occasionally cold. What were your inspirations in developing these characters?
Liza Tully: To come up with my detective, I first thought about the mystery genre’s most iconic character, Sherlock Holmes, and quickly realized that I didn’t want to go in that direction. I wanted my detective to be someone who I—and, hopefully, you—could identify with more easily.
So the character I came up with, Aubrey Merritt, is neither neurodivergent nor specially gifted. Her detective skills boil down to three abilities we all have to some degree: close observation, rigorous critical thinking, and some understanding of the human heart. So she’s more in the tradition of Miss Marple, only not nearly as nice.
Aubrey achieved her professional renown the way most people in the real world do: through brains, talent, decades of really hard work, and the endless refining of her craft. She sacrificed a lot to become the best, and the jury is out on whether that was too much.
She is a workaholic and a loner. She can be abrasive, insensitive, and demanding. There is a certain darkness in her that is the inevitable result of having spent three decades thinking mostly about murder. Plus, when we meet her, she is over sixty. She can’t climb fences or run down alleys anymore, and her eyesight is starting to bother her.
Her detective skills boil down to three abilities we all have to some degree: close observation, rigorous critical thinking, and some understanding of the human heart.Dealing with the indignities of aging, and with a world that’s becoming progressively less recognizable to her, makes her irritable at times. She is definitely a flawed character, but (in my opinion at least) her finer qualities—moral clarity, professional integrity, fearlessness, and her sheer tenacity in the pursuit of truth—redeem her.
When I started thinking about the sidekick character, I again considered some iconic figures. Sherlock Holmes has Dr. Watson. Hercule Poirot has Captain Hastings. Nero Wolfe has Archie.
The good thing about a sidekick, from a writer’s point of view, is that he gives the detective someone to discuss the case with. The sidekick stands in for the reader, asking the obvious questions and trying to figure things out. He can also lighten the mood. But probably the most noticeable quality of the sidekicks I just mentioned is that they are significantly less intelligent that the detectives, so they always make the detectives look good.
I liked everything but that last part. I didn’t want my sidekick to be noteworthy primarily for her inferiority to the main character. I wanted her to be strong and interesting in her own right, but I also needed to keep her from stealing the detective’s limelight.
So the character I came up with, Olivia Blunt, is more than a sidekick but less than a competitor. She’s an apprentice with ambition. Whether she will ever be as smart and successful as her boss is a question no one can answer, but the possibility exists.
We watch her just as Aubrey does, with hope and worry, as we observe her progress and regressions. Sometimes she’s brilliant and sometimes she’s a disaster. A lot of the pleasure I got from writing this book was from playing inside that space.
JBV: Given how different they are, it’s no surprise that their relationship is rocky. But it’s also surprisingly productive. What do you think makes it work?
LT: The glue that holds Aubrey and Olivia together despite their differences is simple: they need each other.
Aubrey has come to the point in her life when she needs to pass on everything she has learned to a worthy apprentice who will carry on her work. If she doesn’t, all her skill and wisdom will die with her. This is an inner drive that I think a lot of older people feel.
Olivia, on the other end, wants her life to be special and amazing. Specifically, she wants to be a great or very good detective. Working for Aubrey Merritt gives her the best chance she’ll probably ever get of exploring her potential and possibly making her dream come true. She needs Aubrey as much as Aubrey needs her.
Their relationship gives purpose to both their lives. I don’t know of a stronger bond than that. So when they disagree, or approach a problem from different angles, even when they argue, they don’t actually get farther apart from each other. They come closer together. The more they work together, the stronger each of them becomes.
JBV: Aubrey and Olivia have drawn comparisons to other partnerships found in popular books (The Thursday Murder Club) and TV (Hacks), at least in part given differences in things like age, personality, and skill set (not to mention your authorial style and tone). Do you feel that these comparisons to pre-existing figures will be a help or a hindrance in reaching readers—or perhaps a bit of both?
LT: I think comparisons to a successful TV show like Hacks or a popular mystery series like The Thursday Murder Club (in the sense that it has older characters) are likely to help my book at first. Light-hearted mysteries and older protagonists are obviously having a moment, and you won’t hear me complain if my book gets more attention because it’s in step with a current trend.
But that extra attention, if it happens at all, will fade rather quickly into the noisy tumult of the book world. Ultimately readers are the ones who decide a book’s fate, and you’re not going to win them over simply by writing gray-haired characters with creaky joints.
JBV: Given Aubrey’s reputation, her powers of perception need to be unparalleled. What are the challenges of creating a mystery—here, a possible murder staged as a suicide—that is worthy of her talents and yet isn’t beyond the readers’ own comprehension (at least in retrospect)?
LT: You just put your finger on the big challenge of writing a fair-play mystery. The author has to give readers all the clues they need to solve the crime while simultaneously trying to prevent them from doing exactly that! There are, of course, any number of strategies for accomplishing this. You can distract the reader with red herrings, tack the clue in such plain sight that no one notices, bury information in casual dialog, and so on.
The Internet is full of tried-and-true methods. But a lot of those tricks have been around so long they feel stale, and hardcore mystery lovers—people who’ve read dozens and possibly hundreds of mysteries–are not an easy bunch to fool.
Now would probably be a good time for me to say something smart about the clues in a mystery novel. But all I can say for sure is that, for me, they are context dependent. Most of the clues in my book emerged spontaneously from the text. At different points in the writing process, I went back to my notebook and made a list of all the details in the story that could possibly be clues, and then I elevated a number of them in a rewrite.
Towards the end of the writing process, several of those clues had become quite significant, and I revised once again to give them their due. The nice thing about doing it that way is that you end up with some surprising clues that genuinely belong to the story.
JBV: The story is set against the backdrop of a family-owned luxury resort that sits beside Lake Champlain—which represents a closed setting and a finite number of suspects. Tell us about this set-up and how you were able to use it to amplify atmosphere and suspense. More broadly, how do you see place as informing plot?
LT: Years ago, I spent a few days at a resort in Vermont very much like the one I describe in the book. It was definitely the lap of luxury. All you had to do was eat, sleep, and enjoy as many activities as you wanted from all the ones available. Though the place was wonderful in many respects, life there was so perfectly curated that it brought out my suspicious side.
I kept wondering what, if any, disreputable things might be going on behind the scenes. When I was looking for a place to stage my murder mystery, that resort popped into my mind immediately. It was perfect. I didn’t even consider anything else.
JBV: While the book’s central mystery is resolved, there are some intrigues – Aubrey’s mysterious past, Olivia’s impending nuptials, the tenuous truce they’ve brokered – that persist. What is your approach to offsetting a standalone story with overarching threads? How much of that big picture do you need to know as you write the individual books that will ultimately comprise a series?
LT: I know exactly how Aubrey and Olivia ought to evolve, and if you read the book, you will know too.
In Aubrey’s case, I would like to see her come to terms with the problem of Olivia—either accept her for who she is and get her up to speed so she can start detecting on her own, or decide that she is indeed hopeless, fire her, and find someone else to help her. I would also like to see Aubrey open up about her past and go back and fix whatever is back there that needs to be fixed, if that’s possible.
It absolutely goes without saying that she needs to make peace with her son in Los Angeles, and that needs to happen sooner rather than later, because relationships with children are way too important to let slide. Lastly, I wish she would make a doctor’s appointment to find out what the hell is going on with her eyes.
Olivia also has a lot of work to do. She and Trevor did a great job of falling madly in love, but now they have to figure out how to live together and support each other when they both have stressful careers that keep sending them in opposite directions. Most of all, Olivia’s feelings about Aubrey need to evolve.
By the end of their first case together, her hero worship is fading, and her confidence and affection are growing. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. Eventually she will need to accept that she really doesn’t want, nor could ever become, a carbon copy of her boss. Which will leave her with a crucial question: what kind of detective will she be when she finally steps out of Aubrey’s shadow?
It’s obviously very easy for me, the author, to know what’s good for my characters. Sadly, though, experience has shown me that other people hardly ever (actually, never) do what you think they should.
Aubrey may never make peace with her son. She could fall down the stairs, break her hip, and be gone in a year. Trevor could walk out on Olivia. Or become a Hollywood star and start making millions of dollars a year, at which point Olivia, faced with much-desired economic freedom, might decide to have a baby (and get a puppy) and leave the murder world behind.
In my opinion, that would be a mistake for her, but will she listen to me if I tell her that?
So when it comes to writing a series, all I can say is that I’m going to do my very best to get these ladies moving in the right directions, but I can’t make any promises. Frankly, I have a hard enough time living my own life in a sensible way.
It’s obviously very easy for me, the author, to know what’s good for my characters. Sadly, though, experience has shown me that other people hardly ever (actually, never) do what you think they should.JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next?
LT: Aubrey and Olivia’s next case takes them to a ranch in the New Mexico desert where the Sarah Lawrence Chapter of the Sigma Delta Tau sorority is having its fortieth reunion. The characters at the reunion are a lively bunch. There’s a retired Army Brigadier General, a therapist from Santa Cruz, a middle school science teacher from upstate New York, a corporate headhunter, a famous fantasy author, and a biochemist from MIT.
Things get complicated pretty fast, and Olivia ends up with more responsibility than she feels ready for. The plot structure is a little different from a conventional murder mystery, but there’s still a Great Reveal at the end—actually there are two Great Reveals—that I hope won’t disappoint.
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