Book Review: Mad Mabel

Book Details

Title: Mad Mabel
Author: Sally Hepworth
Genre(s): Mystery, Thriller
Age: Adult
Date Published: October 1st, 2025
Page Count: 352
Goodreads Rating: 4.36⭐
Series: N/A

Vibes:
A hilarious granny murder mystery

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She’s lived on her idyllic street, Kenny Lane, 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 that she has 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.

When a new little girl (talkative, curious, nosy) moves into the neighborhood and stops at nothing to befriend Elsie, her carefully-constructed life threatens to come crashing down as the secrets in Elsie’s past start coming to light. Who was “Mad Mabel” fifty years ago? Who is Elsie Fitzpatrick today? And if the past has a habit of repeating itself, who has the most to lose?

Told with Sally Hepworth’s twists, humor, charm, and heart, MAD MABEL is novel that weaves past and present together–through the power of justice and redemption, and all the way to its stunning conclusion.

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My Rating

4 stars

I went into this book fairly blind, and I think that it was a good choice. I love the writing in this book, and really found Elsie’s voice and character to be hilarious. Her comments all the time about Persephone and everyone else had me cackling. I love the term “buttnuggets” that Daphne used and will now be using it in my vocabulary as needed.

I liked the back and forth between the events that happened in Elsie’s past and her present. I felt the author did a good job keeping you on your toes and making you get invested in the story to keep reading more.

I didn’t see the end coming, and it did make me tear up. Overall this book was a fun ride and I feel bad for Elsie. She just wanted to be loved and her life was harder than it had to be and she can’t outrun it even at 81. 

“Friends are like oxygen. If you’ve been blessed enough to have always been surrounded by friends, you might think I’m overplaying this. I don’t blame you. If you’d always been surrounded by air, you wouldn’t think to credit it for your very existence either. But I’ve spent much of my life gasping for breath, so I promise you, it’s true. Friends are like oxygen.”

“Dicked by the dangling dong of destiny”

“I wipe them away before anyone can see. So this is the pain of loving, I think to myself. This is the pain of being loved.”

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