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Starred review from January 6, 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.

Starred review from January 1, 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

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January 15, 2020
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.

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Starred review from December 1, 2019
At last, a woman in peril thriller that doesn't involve a handsome, psychopathic husband or a seemingly sympathetic but ultimately homicidal neighborhood kid. 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. The setting is present-day Atlantic City, itself portrayed very much like a woman on the way down itself, with its crumbling boardwalk and shuttered or barely-hanging-on casinos. We know at the book's start that two women have been murdered and placed in the marshes just outside of Atlantic City. Throughout the novel, the victims, Jane Does 1 and 2, are joined by more Janes; Mullen is brilliant at depicting their points of view as they think over what went wrong. The two main characters?a young psychic reader brought up to thievery, and then to prostitution, by her aunt, and another young woman who threw away a comfortable life and now works at a down-at-the-heels spa in a casino?form a loose coalition to discover what happened to a girl they both sort of knew who went missing. Their stories interlock with those of the other Janes, and Mullen builds almost unbearable suspense about whether the two friends will join the women in the marshes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)