The voices of the dead tell the unhappy story of PLEASE SEE US (Gallery, 341 pp., $26.99), Caitlin Mullen’s spellbinding debut novel about a series of murders in Atlantic City. When the narrative opens, there are two dead women sprawled in the marsh behind the Sunset Motel. By the end of the story, there will be seven of these Jane Does, all victims of a killer who targets prostitutes, the most disposable of women.

Then an older man consults a psychic named Clara, hoping she might lead him to his 18-year-old niece, Julie Zale, who has been missing for months. “I didn’t need to be a psychic to know that something bad had happened to Julie Zale,” says Clara. “I had witnessed what happens to girls who run away and wash up here, like debris dragged in by the tide.” Mullen pays these women (who are beginning to pile up behind the motel) the courtesy of rich histories and sympathetic understanding of how they met their sad fates.

Janes No. 1 and No. 2 are Jersey girls. They both had jobs on the boardwalk when they were young and drunk on Springsteen songs, and they both felt betrayed by the city that had promised them “grand destinies.” Jane No. 3 is a married woman suffering from postpartum depression who bolted from her husband and their baby girl. Jane No. 4 is Julie Zale, a prostitute’s daughter who had recently taken up her mother’s profession.

Even as the murders multiply, “the city won’t treat the cases as the work of one person,” Mullen cynically observes. “Pressure from the politicians, from the casinos; the words serial killer will scare off whatever tourists are left.”

The pity of it is that, by refusing to link the cases, the city heartlessly deprives the victims of the only comfort and dignity left to them — their kinship as women. “Having lain there, sisterly, so close, for so long, the women bristle at the absurdity.”

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It’s such a cheat to throw suspicion on the clearly blameless protagonist of your story, yet writers do it all the time. Even a pro like Julia Spencer-Fleming, whose mysteries featuring Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne are such a pleasure, resorts to that narrative device. In HID FROM OUR EYES (Minotaur, 339 pp., $27.99), Van Alstyne, now the police chief of the rugged Adirondacks town of Millers Kill, came under suspicion in 1972, when a dead woman in a white lace minidress turned up in the middle of Route 137. Now, another victim — “pretty, young, all dressed up, with no shoes or pantyhose” — brings back this lawman’s memories of what it’s like to be innocent but unable to prove it.

Because Millers Kill is a small town, the mystery unfolds like a classic country whodunit, complete with lurid back stories for all the righteous grown-ups. And because Van Alstyne is married to an Episcopal priest who is expecting their first child, the human elements cushion the scenes of violence. Tough, but kind of sweet, if you know what I mean.

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Once you’ve seen a strand of trees choked by the relentless kudzu vines that grow wild in the South, you can imagine what it must feel like to be strangled by a python. In BLACKWOOD (Little, Brown, 293 pp., $27), Michael Farris Smith uses the rampant growth of kudzu as a metaphor for the generational secrets and sins that in 1975 are suffocating the Mississippi hill of Red Bluff. But when a stranger who has driven into Red Bluff in a decrepit Cadillac with a woman and a boy (and minus the baby in a diaper they abandoned at a charity donation center) peers under a canopy of kudzu, he sees safety.

Red Bluff also offers shelter to Colburn Evans, an “industrial sculptor” who works with found objects, attracted by the free storefront space given to artists for studios. Once Colburn connects with Celia, who owns the local bar, and the family of vagrants gets the town all riled up, the stage is set for a Southern Gothic tale that is filled with pain and passion and something darker, something evil that leads Colburn down into a hidden cave and face to face with his own worst nightmare.

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What kind of person would kill someone and then steal his cat? Someone like the coldblooded murderer in Peter Swanson’s devious whodunit, EIGHT PERFECT MURDERS (Morrow/HarperCollins, 270 pp., $26.99), that’s who. The chatty storyteller of Swanson’s twisty mystery is Malcolm Kershaw, the proprietor of Old Devils Bookstore on Boston’s Beacon Hill. A trustworthy narrator on all genre matters, Mal once compiled a list of eight perfect literary murders and posted it on the store’s blog, paying tribute to classics like Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” and James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity,” but it seems to have inspired a killer to replicate these fictional murders in real life. Although Swanson doesn’t stint on the homicidal details (“There was a splintery crack as he staggered back, blood falling in a sheet down over his chin”), I’d go along with the reader who took exception to Mal’s list: “Anyone who writes a list of perfect murders that doesn’t have at least one John Dickson Carr on it obviously knows nothing about anything.”