MAY 2021 - AudioFile
A team of compelling narrators tells the story of women murdered and forgotten in seedy Atlantic City. Narrator Hillary Huber delivers the gut-wrenching points of view of a series of Jane Does before and after their murders. Among the living characters, Dara Rosenberg gives voice to Clara, a teenage boardwalk psychic who desperately wants to escape the “dates” her aunt sets up for her, all while being tormented by visions of women covered in flies and mud. Piper Goodeve portrays Lily, a woman who has returned to Atlantic City after a tragic betrayal. Goodeve’s and Rosenberg’s emotional performances make it very difficult not to become fully invested in the well-being of the characters in this Edgar Award-winning title. V.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
The voices of the dead tell the unhappy story of Please See Us, Caitlin Mullen's spellbinding debut novel about a series of murders in Atlantic City…Mullen pays these women…the courtesy of rich histories and sympathetic understanding of how they met their sad fates.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/06/2020
At the start of Mullen’s exceptional debut, the Atlantic City, N.J., boardwalk psychic known as Clara Voyant receives an unexpected client, a man who’s trying to find his missing teenage niece. The man’s visit causes Clara to have visions filled with warnings and bad omens long afterward. In addition, she suddenly feels and hears things that aren’t there. Meanwhile, Clara forges an unlikely friendship with Lily Louten, a former SoHo art gallery worker now employed at a casino spa, who’s dealing with demons of her own, in particular painful memories of her father’s death. After a tough reading for a prostitute nicknamed Peaches, Clara’s visions intensify. Fearing the worst after Peaches disappears, Clara enlists Lily’s help to find her, and they plunge into the dark heart of a tourist town in the middle of economic turmoil. Readers won’t be able to stop turning the pages of this heartbreaking story as it touches on prostitution, drug abuse, and the fates of women who go unseen. Mullen is definitely an author to watch. Agent: Sarah Bedingfield, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Mar.)
Susan Scarf Merrell
"Kudos to Caitlin Mullen, the next big voice in crime fiction, on this gripping, innovative and finely written thriller. Please See Us takes the reader on a tense journey through the crumbling, seedy casinos and boardwalk of Atlantic City. Try to put this book down. You won’t be able to."
CrimeReads
Finally, the Atlantic City mystery we’ve all been waiting for!
Robyn Harding
A dark literary thriller about women who slip through the cracks. Disturbing, powerful, important.
Chloe Benjamin
"Please See Us is riveting, the rare book that unpacks and deplores violence against women even as it depicts it. In Caitlin Mullen’s hands, everyone has a voice, and the dead speak as loudly as the living. Please See Us is a beautifully written, thoughtful page-turner, as well as a tribute to the women— not just victims, but full human beings—who so frequently go unseen."
Paul Harding
"Please See Us is so good I don’t even know where to start – it’s brilliant and it’s dark; it’s heartbreaking and it’s defiant; it’s a riveting thriller and it’s a literary gem. Here are true, beautiful portraits of girls and women whose lives might well otherwise pass by without notice, without proper human value. Caitlin Mullen brings us those lives magnificently– with subtlety, compassion, and utter dignity. This book is a stunner."
Booklist (Starred Review)
"At last, a 'woman in peril' thriller that doesn’t involve a handsome, psychopathic husband. What Mullen’s debut gives readers is a wrenchingly detailed, utterly credible story of women whose peril comes from poverty, either a slow slide or a sudden slip. Brilliant [...] Mullen builds almost unbearable suspense."
Booklist
"At last, a 'woman in peril' thriller that doesn’t involve a handsome, psychopathic husband. What Mullen’s debut gives readers is a wrenchingly detailed, utterly credible story of women whose peril comes from poverty, either a slow slide or a sudden slip. Brilliant [...] Mullen builds almost unbearable suspense."
Bookreporter
"Confronting us with the darkest part of the city, Mullen beckons readers not only to see the women she writes about, but to really look at them and their stories. She writes with an unflinching eye... [her] prose is so beautifully rendered and her pace so careful that you almost forget there is a mystery at the book’s core. Mullen is a bright new talent, and I was constantly in awe of the fact that this is her debut; she is so skilled and so cadenced, with every word chosen with the care of a poet. I foresee a long career for her, and I cannot wait to find out where she turns her literary eye next."
The New York Times Book Review
"The voices of the dead tell the unhappy story of Please See Us, Caitlin Mullen’s spellbinding debut novel about a series of murders in Atlantic City."
Booklist
"At last, a 'woman in peril' thriller that doesn’t involve a handsome, psychopathic husband. What Mullen’s debut gives readers is a wrenchingly detailed, utterly credible story of women whose peril comes from poverty, either a slow slide or a sudden slip. Brilliant [...] Mullen builds almost unbearable suspense."
Library Journal
★ 01/01/2020
DEBUT Abandoned by her mother and manipulated by her aunt and guardian to support them, teenage psychic Clara reads tarot cards on the Atlantic City boardwalk. There she meets Lily, an aspiring art dealer who has returned to Atlantic City after a breakup. Emily is struggling to get through college after leaving an overbearing family and a failed attempt at acting. Peaches, a strung-out prostitute, tries to get clean. When Clara has disturbing visions, she realizes they might have something to do with the disappearances of two young women. She and Lily, who works at a dingy casino nearby, team up to find the truth and save others from a serial killer. VERDICT Written in multiple first-person accounts, including the voices of several murdered women, this is a dark, gritty, and cathartic debut with well-developed characters and a compelling plot that will appeal to fans of Attica Locke, Lou Berney, and Jennifer Hillier. [See Prepub Alert, 8/25/19.]—George Lichman, Rocky River, OH
MAY 2021 - AudioFile
A team of compelling narrators tells the story of women murdered and forgotten in seedy Atlantic City. Narrator Hillary Huber delivers the gut-wrenching points of view of a series of Jane Does before and after their murders. Among the living characters, Dara Rosenberg gives voice to Clara, a teenage boardwalk psychic who desperately wants to escape the “dates” her aunt sets up for her, all while being tormented by visions of women covered in flies and mud. Piper Goodeve portrays Lily, a woman who has returned to Atlantic City after a tragic betrayal. Goodeve’s and Rosenberg’s emotional performances make it very difficult not to become fully invested in the well-being of the characters in this Edgar Award-winning title. V.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-12-23
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She's come back to AC because there's nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen's style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that "Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones." Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because "men are always promised this, no matter who they are." The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.