Please See Us by Caitlin Mullen is a women-in-peril murder mystery written in a haunting, lyrical style.

The book opens with a prologue in the voices of the dead silently calling Please See Us. But no one does. The dead are forgotten women, murdered by a sadist and abandoned in a Jersey City marsh between a dilapidated motel and bridge.

Jersey City is a character…in fact, a metaphor for the deterioration of place and soul. Forces of fate and poverty and lack of resources work against women in this once flourishing city on the shore. Women are forgotten, unseen, easy prey.

Other major characters include the unnamed villain, a bullied deaf man, a disgraced New York art agent, and a sometime psychic. The heart of the story revolves around the blossoming friendship between two young women⁠—the art agent (reduced to working in a day spa) and the psychic (whose reduced circumstances impel her to petty theft). These two unlikely friends band together to search for the missing and murdered women.

Overall, I have to say, this was not the book I was expecting. I was expecting a straight-up, intelligent mystery, maybe along the lines of I’d Know You Anywhere (Goodreads listed Laura Lippman as a comp writer on the Please See Us blurb) or a psychic drama similar to the series Medium. However, Please See Us was far darker than I imagined it would be. In fact, in the middle, I had to take some time off and read…cough, cough…a romance. Maybe even (true confessions, here) more than one romance.

Thus fortified with fluff, I returned to Please See Us, heart pounding, nails a-bitten. The climax was, well, climactic…and also perfect. And the writing is so beautiful and haunting. As is the lingering message about the choices left to women in a city depressed both economically and morally. The title itself, while it refers to the women murdered by a sadistic man, also speaks for the forgotten, live women fighting to survive and even thrive in dismal conditions.

When I finished the book, I went back and re-read the prologue. And I was even more dazzled than I was the first time I read it. Because what I glimpsed the second time around was an homage to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Just me? In the prologue of Please See Us cars and trucks delivered filet mignon to the casinos just as cars and trucks delivered bootleg and oranges to Gatsby’s home—both juxtaposed beside grim, dying landscapes. And the eyes of the murdered women in Please See Us was so very reminiscent of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg—ever-present eyes in both books seeing all.

I highly recommend Please See Us to readers who enjoy an intelligent (though dark) mystery with that something extra, that something which will remain in your mind after the last page is turned.

I received a copy of Please See Us from the publisher via Netgalley.