When looking for an interesting new murder mystery to read and review, I came across Please See Us, and I became intrigued by the setting. I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a very strange place in many ways, and this novel was set in current day A.C. I’ve never read a book set in my home town, although I’ve always been drawn to the idea of setting a story there. In many ways it is a sad, depressing place, with layers of entertainment oriented businesses— the boardwalk, with its cheap t-shirt, trinkets, arcades, and salt water taffy stores; the amusement rides, games, and carnival amusements; the casinos, restaurants, and the attempt at higher end Vegas-style entertainment; and the sex workers, who have been a constant feature of the city in good economic times, and bad. All of this entertainment situated in an environment of natural beauty, which is easy to miss, and that so many visit and avoid. Atlantic City sits on a barrier island, Absecon Island, with the beach and ocean on one side, and back bays and marshlands on the land side. Many who enjoy the beauty of the setting try to avoid the pseudo-glamour and glitz, and all the downside it brings— drugs, prostitution, violence. This novel succeeds at catching the current flavor of the place, as well as the current state of decay and hopelessness.

People who come to Atlantic City in Mullen’s story think they are escaping to a place where they can reinvent themselves, make some quick easy money selling some part of their souls, then leave for wherever their real life will begin, and try to forget this interlude. A.C. is a temporary stop that all seek to escape, if only they could save enough money, and not get too harmed in the process. Much of the local economy means that women sell themselves to men, who themselves on on a break from their real lives to see some glitz, feel important, pick up a hot woman, and live the fantasy displayed on the billboards as you enter the town. It is all a fake fantasy, a con, just like the faux tropical setting in the casino bar, a pseudo-experience that no one looks at too hard, not to dispel the fakery. For women, it is the sort of place where you are planning your escape, dreaming of a real life far away. Each character has her public personna, and her private back story of bad choices, humiliation, and disgrace.

Lilly made the escape to a good college and art career in New York, but made a bad judgement and landed back at home near A.C. to get back on her feet, make money working at a casino spa and plot her escape. Into her orbit comes Clara (Ava), teenaged high school dropout, abandoned by her mother to be raised by her aunt, part time cocktail waitress, part time prostitute, and together they run a storefront psychic parlor. As a psychic, Clara meets various women running from degrading or suffocating pasts, trying to figure out their futures, and she starts to experience startling flashes of dangerous, chilling events. As Clara and Lilly try to figure out what these flashes mean, they also try to figure out their lives, and what they can do to escape this dead end of a place. It is clear that a serial killer is preying on the women in their orbit, and Clara and Lily are at risk to become his next victims, or stop the predator.

Mullen succeeds in maintaining the pacing, creating en engaging slow burn of mystery, and ramping up the action as the women come dangerously close to joining the deceased sorority. It stands on its own merits as a good mystery, but has the added element of Atlantic City as a character, a fantasy of adult pleasures, in an economically failing, depressing place, that appeals to people’s most base and depraved desires, victimizing those who cannot escape. This book is the essence of a beach read. Recommended.