Tell Me What You See: A Moody Psychic Thriller
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What do you do when a book is genuinely well written, and you still find yourself wrestling with it the whole way through? Because I almost DNF’d Tell Me What You See.
Let me say that up front, because anything I tell you about Tell Me What You See has to sit next to the fact that I came this close to closing the Kindle app and walking away.
The only reason I didn’t?
I had two hours of reading time left, one hour before I had to pick up my kid, and I didn’t have the energy to start something new. (First world problem. I know.)
And yet. Here I am writing about it.
Because this book is doing something. Something real. Something that, if a few key things had gone differently, would have made it one of the standouts of my reading year. Instead, it landed somewhere stranger. Somewhere I’m still working through. So let’s get into it.
Title: Tell Me What You See
Author: Samantha Jayne Allen
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Format: eARC
Genre: Mystery
Release Date: March 02, 2027
Pages: 384
Star Rating: 3 stars
Spice Rating: 0 chili peppers
The Setup
Tell Me What You See gives us Cheyenne Mitchell, back in her hometown of Tehachapi, California, running her late mother’s New Age store along a quiet strip mall on the highway. Her mother, Johanna Vincent, was a TV psychic who died nearly twenty years before.
Around the same time, the town lost a beloved high school teacher to a disappearance that was never solved.
Now another teenager has gone missing. The pattern feels familiar. And Cheyenne, who spent her whole adult life being agnostic about everything her mother stood for, can’t shake the feeling that the answer she needs is buried in a past she’s been trying to outrun.
Here’s the thing I have to say first, before any of the harder stuff:
This does not read like a debut.
The prose is confident. The world-building is detailed without ever drowning you. You can feel Tehachapi—the strip mall, the highway, the desert switchback, the abandoned mines, the fog rolling down the mountain. The atmosphere is not dark exactly. It’s moody. Heavy in a quiet way. Like the air right before a storm that never quite breaks.
If you’ve read Stacy Willingham—A Flicker in the Dark, especially—you’ll feel the kinship immediately. That same sense of a daughter circling a familial-shaped hole. That same Southern-Gothic but make it California vibe, with the same simmering dread.
On a sentence level? This author has it. Full stop.
The Pacing Problem (And the Past That Wouldn’t Earn Its Keep)
So why am I sitting at three stars?
Let’s start with the slow burn because this is a slow-burning mystery thriller in the most literal sense.
At 13% in, I felt like I had been reading for a hundred years. I know slow burn is a love language for some readers. I usually count myself among them. But there’s slow burn that’s coiling, and there’s slow burn that’s just…stalled. This is closer to the second.
The book is told in dual timeline—then and now, past and present— and I went in ready to love it. Dual timelines are one of my favorite structural tools. When they work, the past doesn’t just inform the present. It reframes it. Each flashback should land with a small shock.
But the past chapters here…meander. They feel like exposition wearing a costume. I know on a structural level that the then is supposed to set up the now.
I just rarely felt the payoff.
The past is the weakest part of this book, by a noticeable margin. Every time I dropped back into a flashback, I could feel my engagement leaking out the bottom.
When You Can’t Get Inside Your Own Narrator
Cheyenne is told to us in the first person. Which usually means you’re inside her, a half-step behind her thoughts, hijacked by her senses.
First person is supposed to be a portal.
Here it isn’t.
I genuinely cannot point to a single moment where I felt shoved inside Cheyenne’s head. The whole book held me at arm’s length, even when she was theoretically baring her soul.
Which is a real shame, because her interior should have been electric.
The daughter of a psychic she can’t access. A woman who wants help but refuses to be pitied. Suspicious of everyone, even as a kid, in ways that often feel unwarranted. Waiting for closure and running from it in the same breath. That ungroundedness should have been claustrophobic to read. Instead, you watch her go through it from the lobby.
And then somewhere around the middle, that ungroundedness shifts into something else.
Chyenne becomes erratic. She wants Wade (her stepfather) to be guilty so badly that she stops investigating and starts forcing the answer she’s already decided on.
He hasn’t been in her life since she was 17 (in her late 30s now). And the way she inserts herself back into his life, circling him, watching her, reads to me as deeply uncomfortable in a way the narrative never quite reckons with.
By 60% in, I had no real puzzle pieces to work with, and in a thriller, that’s a problem. Some of that may be intentional misdirection. But some of it is that Cheyenne’s tunnel vision narrows the book’s investigative scope along with hers. We can’t see around her, because she’s the only window we have.
The Last 50 Pages…
And then.
The last 50 pages.
The last 50 pages are the best part of the book.
It tightens. You don’t see who it is until the very moment you’re meant to. And whether that lands as a masterful misdirect or a planting issue depends entirely on what you’re willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt on.
I’m genuinely torn.
There’s a version of this story where the underplanting was the point.
Where we are meant to be as blindsided as Cheyenne, to feel the floor drop the same way she does, to realize too late that we were looking the wrong way the whole time.
That is a real, honorable thriller move. There’s another version where the planting just wasn’t tight enough, and the late cohesion is more accidental than architectural.
I lean somewhere in the middle. The reveal works. But it’s working hard against the reader’s exhaustion from the story to get there.
I think Tell Me What You See would have done well with the killer’s POV.
Even brief slanted glimpses would have given the reader something to hold onto while Cheyenne tunneled. Without it, we’re essentially trapped. Which—see above—was already the central problem.
The resolution itself? Ehhh, it works. It just doesn’t land the way the prose deserved.
📚 Read This If You Like…
- Stacy Willingham, especially A Flicker in the Dark
- Slow-burning mystery thrillers with mood-heavy, atmospheric prose
- Cold case structures where a daughter reopens her mother’s death
- Small town California setting with desert geography and quiet menace
- Stories about psychics, mediums, and the daughters they leave behind
- Books where the writing alone is enough to keep you reading
🛑Skip This If You…
- Need a thriller that hands you puzzle pieces along the way
- Bounce off slow openings (this one is patient with itself, possibly to a fault)
- Need a deep, intimate first-person POV, this one keeps you outside
- Lose patience with FMC, whose obsessions tip into something the book doesn’t seem to notice
- Want every dual timeline chapter to feel necessary
Final Thoughts
Three stars.
One for the atmosphere. One for the prose. And another for those last 50 pages, clawing it back from a DNF. Somewhere in this book is a four-and-a-half-star writer learning how to be a thriller author, and when those two things finally meet, it’s going to be a hell of a read.
I’ll absolutely be there for the next one.
🛒Where to Get It
Shop indie. Always.
Grab Tell Me What You See on Bookshop.org. Every order supports an independent bookstore, at no extra cost to you.
If Bookshop isn’t an option for you, Amazon is an option, but please make it your last resort.
Thank you to Minotaur Books for providing me with an eARC of Tell Me What You See to read and review.
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