Caitlin Mullen Books in Order

Caitlin Mullen grew up between upstate New York and the Jersey Shore, two places that continue to show up in the landscapes of her fiction. She has written about the pull of the shore, from its tourist gloss to its quieter, stranger corners.

Mullen studied English and creative writing at Colgate University, then earned an MA in English from New York University. She later completed an MFA in fiction at Stony Brook University.

During graduate school, she taught undergraduate creative writing and worked as an editor and contributing writer for The Southampton Review. Her early fiction appeared in several literary magazines, and she also received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Before publishing novels, Mullen spent time working around books as a bookseller in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She has said that talking with customers and recommending books helped her think more clearly about what a reader needs from a story: a strong setup, a reason to care, and characters worth following.

That reader-first habit stayed with her.

Her first longer work, Deep Enough, is a short story that looks at grief, loneliness, and the uneasy search for connection in New Jersey's Pine Barrens. It introduced elements that recur in her work, including unsettled places, people carrying private pain, and the way loss can change ordinary decisions.

Mullen's debut novel, Please See Us, arrived in 2020. Set in a struggling Atlantic City, it brings together Clara, a young boardwalk psychic troubled by visions, and Lily, a former gallery assistant working at a casino spa. As women begin disappearing, their unlikely friendship becomes part of a dangerous search for answers. The novel won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

The setting came from close observation. Mullen grew up visiting Atlantic City, where her father and grandmother worked in casinos, and she later worked as a spa receptionist herself. She built the book around the city's fading casinos, salt marshes, and the real, unsolved 2006 killings of four women in the area, while keeping the focus on the lives too often overlooked after violence occurs.

Her later novel, Heather, returns to the New Jersey Pine Barrens for a mystery that moves between a past disappearance and a present-day police investigation. Across her fiction, Mullen is interested in women under pressure, family history, friendship, grief, and the secrets a place can hold for decades.

She keeps returning to people others might fail to notice.

Mullen lives in New Jersey with her husband and children. Her books tend to pair tense investigations with intimate, character-led stories, making room for fear, anger, compassion, and hard-won connection.