Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

"Elsie Fitzpatrick is quite content to live a quiet life, tending her garden, reading her books, and spending time with her best friend Daphne. The peace is soon shattered when her neighbor is found dead, and Elsie is the unfortunate one to discover the body. A news story is soon published, revealing the dark truth of Elsie's past as "Mad Mabel" Victoria's first convicted female murderer at the ripe old age of fifteen. What follows is an often heart-wrenching but also hilarious tale of found family, love, and the truly unbreakable power of friendship."

⭐⭐⭐⭐️⭐

Pros: Mabel is a saucy beast, and I liked her immediately/Beneath all that irreverence is a woman capable of great love and devotion/Hepworth was great with pacing and suspense. 

Cons: The "big reveal" at the end and Mabel's "inheritance" just seemed rather extraneous. 

Full Review:

Elsie Fitzpatrick is a crotchety, sarcastic, 81-year-old woman living on a small street in Australia and minding her own business. She tries her best to stay under the radar and not call attention to herself. Most of her time is spent with her best friend, Daphne, and neither of them minds the quiet life. 

When Persephone, the daughter of a single mother named Roxanne, asks to interview Elsie for a school project, Elsie tries to avoid it. She's not a big fan of children, especially Persephone, who's loud and obtrusive. When Elsie mentions Ishaan, her 91-year-old neighbor, explaining he'd be better suited for the task, Persephone says she can't interview him because he's dead. 

When Elsie knocks on Ishaan's door, no one answers, and so she climbs the back fence and sees that he is, in fact, lying dead on his kitchen floor. Well, that's unfortunate. 

The police are called, and since Elsie found the body, they question her. She explains that she never liked Ishaan;  he was, in fact, her nemesis in a way, since he never took care of his dog Nugget, letting it bark all day and make a mess of her yard. She doesn't think anything will come from the interview until an article is published in the newspaper, claiming that she, the infamous Mad Mabel, is on a killing streak once again. 

Well, that's troublesome. 

The simple fact is that yes, Elsie and Mabel are one and the same. She was the youngest person to ever be tried and convicted of murder in Australia. She's done her best to get on with her life after all that hullabaloo. Now she's been thrust back into the spotlight. She agrees to give an interview to two YouTubers, telling her side of the story in hopes that it will cut the head off this media beast and keep it from escalating. 

Things start to change, though, when a man begins appearing regularly on the street, looking for Roxanne and acting all around suspect. Elsie, though she's loathe to admit it,  has started to like Persephone, and so she agrees to help Roxanne with this troublesome man, the best way she knows how.

Mabel was a complicated character, having had a lonely and difficult childhood with parents who found it hard to show affection. Secrets were kept, resentments built, and honestly, when the truth was finally revealed, I totally understood why Mabel did what she did. In Mabel, Hepworth has created a funny, irreverent but honest character, and the pacing and flow of the story were absolutely spot on. There's no wonder this book is a "hot title. I absolutely devoured it.