A cackle-out-loud mystery wrapped around a love letter to female friendship, with the richest narrative voice Sally Hepworth has written yet. The book earns its laughs, earns its tears, and mostly earns its twist. Mystery purists may grumble that the whodunnit mechanics take a back seat to the character work; readers who come for heart and humour will walk away completely fed.
Meet Elsie (Or Is She Mabel?)
Picture this: an eighty-one-year-old woman, six feet tall, reddish-grey hair, a tongue sharp enough to skin a rat, and a habit of calling her neighbours “dipshit” before breakfast. She lives on Kenny Lane, a cobbled Melbourne back-street where everyone knows everyone’s business (and bin placement). Her name is Elsie Fitzpatrick. Her name is also, in certain very old newspaper clippings, Mabel Waller. In 1959, aged fifteen, she became the youngest Australian in history to be convicted of murder. Sixty-odd years later, her nemesis next door turns up dead on his kitchen floor, a new little girl on the lane will not leave her alone, and a photocopied news article slides under her door.
That is the opening gambit of Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth, and from the prologue onward, the novel trades on a premise Elsie herself spells out on page one: the two groups nobody ever suspects of murder are little girls and old ladies. Hepworth, with her usual taste for darkly amusing domestic crime, proceeds to give you both.
Who’s Writing This (And Why You Should Care)
I’ve read every Sally Hepworth novel to date, including the quieter backlist titles like The Secrets of Midwives and The Mother’s Promise that sit before her big pivot into domestic thrillers. I also run a book blog where dual-timeline mysteries cross my desk weekly. I say that not to puff myself up but to locate this review: I’m a long-time Hepworth reader explaining what works, what wobbles, and whether Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth deserves your weekend.
A Dual-Timeline Dance: Then and Now
The structure alternates between Now (Elsie in 2025 on Kenny Lane, juggling a suspicious death, a meddling child named Persephone, and a very intense detective with a throbbing forehead vein) and Then (Mabel in the 1940s and 50s growing up in Rosehill, the family’s grand Edwardian mansion, under a hostile father, a beautiful mother who drinks sherry in front of the mirror, and two aunts called Cess and Ness who slowly become her chosen family).
What works about this dance:
- The Then chapters read like a coming-of-age novel with teeth. Young Mabel’s isolation, her slow discovery of a dead sister called Kitty, her finding of soulmate friend Daphne, and her first dangerous infatuation with a schoolteacher are drawn with tenderness and restraint.
- The Now chapters crackle with humour. Elsie’s running commentary on postman Dwayne (“as if his mother had a stroke while filling in his birth certificate”), on Ishaan’s demonic Chihuahua Nugget, and on Persephone’s terrifying homework demands are the funniest pages Hepworth has put on paper.
- The two timelines genuinely speak to each other. By the time you understand why Elsie flinches when Persephone knocks, you also understand what happened on Bonfire Day in 1959.
Where it wobbles: the Then chapters, for about the middle third, start to outpace the Now mystery. The present-day investigation goes quiet for long stretches while we sit with teenage Mabel in a Catholic classroom. Readers who came primarily for the whodunnit can find their patience tested.
The Voice: Aunty Elsie Has Opinions
Hepworth writes Elsie in a first-person voice so specific it feels transcribed rather than composed. The woman digresses, rants, apologises for digressing, rants again. She mocks herself. And she tenderises her neighbours like cheap steak. She describes her cast-iron best friend Daphne as a “thick, solid line right down the middle” of her life, magenta rather than black. If you’ve read The Good Sister or Darling Girls, you’ll recognise Hepworth’s love of an unreliable-but-self-aware narrator, except this voice is older, funnier, and more bruised. It is easily the most distinctive protagonist in her catalogue.
The Elements, Weighed Honestly
A quick ledger of what Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth does well, and where it falters:
- Humour: A clear standout. Elsie’s cranky Melbourne patter is the engine. Losing a page of it would hurt.
- Friendship: Hepworth calls this “a love story about platonic female love,” and she isn’t kidding. The bond between young Mabel and Daphne is the book’s emotional backbone.
- Mystery mechanics: Competent rather than dazzling. The central whodunnit is solvable a beat or two before the reveal, and certain clues are signposted a little too brightly for genre-literate readers.
- Side cast: Joan the note-leaving neighbour, Peter the Greek, Roxanne the exhausted single mother, and Persephone the seven-year-old bulldozer are characters, not decorations. Nugget the Chihuahua deserves her own spin-off.
- Pacing: The opening is electric, the middle sags briefly in the 1950s schoolroom, and the last hundred pages gallop.
- Emotional payoff: Hepworth plays two aces in the final stretch. One is fully earned. The other might feel, for sharper-eyed readers, a shade too neat.
What Might Annoy You
Let me be honest, because this is a review rather than a fan letter. A few things may land as weaknesses depending on your taste. The ending pivots from darkly funny mystery into something closer to a tear-jerking redemption story, and not every reader will welcome the tonal handbrake turn. The podcaster framing device (two young documentary makers named Libby and Adeem) is charming in places and a touch convenient in others, giving Elsie a tidy way to narrate chunks of backstory. And one late reveal (which I won’t describe) is the sort of beat that Hepworth fans have seen shimmer at the edges of earlier novels; if you were hoping for the jaw-on-the-floor twist of her career, this may not quite clear the bar.
Should You Read It?
If The Soulmate, Darling Girls, or The Good Sister worked for you, then Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth belongs on your bedside table immediately. If you’ve never read Hepworth before, this is a warmer entry point than Darling Girls (which goes darker on foster-care trauma) and kinder than The Soulmate (which is chillier and more marital). It’s not the most tightly plotted mystery in her catalogue, but it may be the most heart-forward, and it is certainly her funniest.
Read-Alikes For Your TBR
If Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth lands for you, try these:
- Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn. Four retired assassins in their sixties discover their own agency wants them dead. Older women plus lethal competence.
- The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. Pensioners in an English retirement village pick at cold cases. Same warmth, same gentle menace, same belief that old people are interesting.
- Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. Australian setting, dark humour, a narrator with a taste for metafictional asides.
- The Appeal by Janice Hallett. A community-set mystery told through emails and texts, with similarly nosy neighbours and a slow-burn reveal.
- Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey. A mystery narrated by an older woman whose memory is unravelling, for when you want a Mabel-adjacent voice in a more melancholy key.
- How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley. A found-family story about older women refusing to be invisible.
Final Word
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth is not a perfect crime novel, and frankly it isn’t trying to be. It’s a book about two women who loved each other for seventy years, dressed up in a murder-mystery coat that occasionally hangs a bit loose on the shoulders. Accept it on those terms and it rewards you generously. Go in expecting taut domestic-noir plotting above all else, and you may feel slightly short-changed. Either way, the old lady at the centre of it, as she would put it herself, is an absolute card.