Caitlin Mullen

In this sophisticated, suspenseful debut reminiscent of Laura Lippman and Megan Miranda, two young women become unlikely friends during one fateful summer in Atlantic City as mysterious disappearances hit dangerously close to home. Summer has come to Atlantic City but the boardwalk is empty of tourists, the casino lights have dimmed, and two Jane Does are laid out in the marshland behind the Sunset Motel, just west of town. Only one person even knows they’re there. Meanwhile, Clara, a young boardwalk psychic, struggles to attract clients for the tarot readings that pay her rent. When she begins to experience very real and disturbing visions, she suspects they could be related to the recent cases of women gone missing in town. When Clara meets Lily, an ex-Soho art gallery girl who is working at a desolate casino spa and reeling from a personal tragedy, she thinks Lily may be able to help her. But Lily has her own demons to face. If they can put the pieces together in time, they may save another lost girl—so long as their efforts don’t attract perilous attention first. Can they break the ill-fated cycle, or will they join the other victims? A “beautifully written, thoughtful page-turner” (Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists), Please See Us is an evocative and compelling psychological thriller that explores the intersection of womanhood, power, and violence.

Please See Us

Lindsay

Earlier that night, we'd felt admitted to a new kind of existence, as the bouncers eyed our obviously fake IDs and still slashed x's on the back of our hands with black marker, and when the bartender poured us each a double shot of rum for the price of a single. The memory made me dig my nails into my palms. The world was always conspiring to make young women vulnerable while labelling it as 'fun'. Made it seem like we were in control, like we were making choices, and that it was our fault when things went wrong. Us in our short skirts, our makeup, our taste for rum, for liking the things we were told to like, wanting what we were taught to want.

When we sat, Tom ordered a bottle of foreign-named red wine.

"Very good," the waiter said, like Tom had passed a test.

I wondered if men everywhere congratulated one another on such stupid trivial things. 

It's not that you think there is anything elegant or noble about suffering. Pain is just pain, too abundant and easy to come by to mean anything other than itself. It does not mean redemption, or absolution, and it doesn't make you stronger. But happiness can be a burden too. When it comes down to it, you don't know how to be a human, how to bear either pain or joy.

She realizes that's her problem, has always been her problem: peace feels too much like emptiness. She wonders if chemically, neurologically, she's missing something that would help her differentiate between the two.

I wondered  if we weren't worth a handshake, if he only wanted to touch us the way men felt permitted to touch girls in bars, at the smalls of their backs, when pushing through a crowd, a squeeze on the arm for emphasis.

Was there anyone angrier than a man rejected? Than a man who had seen repulsion on your face when he had expected to find admiration, lust? Was there any limit to what that kind of man could do to you, the ways he felt entitled to retaliate?

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