Book review: Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth is another I missed getting during the year for review, so I only read it belatedly during my brief Christmas sojourn. 81-year-old Elsie is a bit like a character out of a Fredrick Backman book. Sassy and grouchy to all except her long-time friend Daphne and Pete, a neighbour. We learn she’s lived on Kenny Lane for 60 years and it’s a societal microcosm of sorts and also includes a single mother and her rowdy 7-year-old daughter, and the litigious Joan who’s constantly slipping notes under Elsie’s door complaining about one thing or another. When this book opens the latest note references Elsie’s past which she thought she’d left far behind her.

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She's lived on her idyllic street for sixty years—longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else's business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past she's worked exceedingly hard at concealing—because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end.

The events here are precipitated by the death of another neighbour in his nineties and it’s Elsie who finds his body. The police are called and it seems likely to be natural causes until the media picks up the story and (with the help of Joan) learns of Elsie’s past.

Although we move between Elsie’s childhood and the present Hepworth keeps us in the dark for much of the novel about the precipitating events of years earlier. We learn she was the only child of wealthy but disinterested parents and that she’d lost a younger sister… something that her father in particular blamed Elsie for and seemingly led to the Mad Mabel moniker started by other kids. It felt incredibly unfair that a very young Mabel could be seen as culpable, that her parents did nothing to abate it, and unfortunately provides her with a legacy with which she’s laden for years. Thankfully she has her aunt and aunt’s friend who step up and genuinely care for young Mabel in her parents’ absence, offering glimpses of normalcy and love.

In the present the police pick up the media’s unveiling of Elsie as Mad Mabel and she becomes a person of interest in her neighbour’s death. Elsie’s forced to come out of her hermit-like life, taking care of her dead neighbour’s much-maligned dog and spending more and more time with Persephone who views ‘Elsa’ (as she calls her, as a fan of Frozen) to be her friend. The 81-year-old also decides to fight back and agrees to participate in a podcast, and tell Mad Mabel’s side of the story.

Hepworth offers a stack of great characters here, from Elsie to her neighbours and young Persephone as well as those in the past, namely Mabel’s aunt and aunt’s friend. There are some deeper themes around consequences of our actions, something her neighbour Joan is confronted with as a result of the events following her reveal of Elsie’s past, as well as Elsie’s own actions in childhood. This is a tragic story, so it’s easy to get complacent knowing much of the tragedy is in the past and everyone’s moved on, but by bringing a real threat into the present it means that Elsie’s story is far from over.