1 hour ago
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By Candida Baker
November 5, 2025 — 12.00pm
FICTION
Mad Mabel
Sally Hepworth
Macmillan $34.99
Sally Hepworth has described herself as a Nell Mangel character – the Neighbours busybody who wanted to know what everyone was doing. It’s a curiosity that has served Hepworth (who has written 15 bestsellers in 10 years) well. She has built a dedicated audience, concentrating on the domestic thriller genre she’s claimed as her own, her plots filled with darkly suspenseful characters who all come from a colourful array of dysfunctional families.
In Mad Mabel, the protagonist, Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, is 81. Elsie has lived in Kenny Lane for 60 years with her friend Daphne, in a small and colourful community where everyone minds everyone else’s business. There’s Pete the Greek; the litigious troublemaker Joan Waters; Roxanne, a troubled single mother to Persephone; Elsie, who is not fond of children; Elsie’s arch-nemesis Ishaan and his “deranged chihuahua” Nugget; and a Vietnamese couple, the Nguyens, who don’t like it when people use up the public parking spaces.
Elsie has a bad habit of telling people what she thinks of them in no uncertain terms, and unfortunately when Elsie discovers Ishaan’s dead body, her throwaway remarks in the past that she’d like to murder him set off alarm bells for Joan. Joan has suspected Elsie’s deep, dark secret for a long time – that Elsie is in fact Mad Mabel, the youngest murderer ever known in Australia, with a history of the people closest to her when she was a teenager meeting a bizarre end.
Hepworth is adept at plot twists and red herrings, and a gradual reveal of the disclosure that things are not what they seem. It’s a formula that has hit the right note with audiences around the world – The Family Next Door became an ABC series, and both Darling Girls and The Soulmate have been optioned for the screen.
A heroine in her 80s is not an easy character to tackle. However, in Mabel, Hepworth goes to town, giving us a grumpy old woman whose desire is to lead a life devoid of emotional relationships, other than with her best friend Daphne. (Without giving too much away, that’s not what it seems, either.)
Bestselling author Sally Hepworth.
As old rumours begin to swirl, and Mabel is implicated in Ishaan’s murder, she also becomes emotionally embroiled in her neighbours’ lives. Nugget, the chihuahua, seems to think Mabel is his saviour, and Persephone clings to her as if she’s a life raft in the domestic turbulence of her life. Only Pete the Greek seems to bring a measure of sanity and stability to the volatile situation they all find themselves in, but even the quiet friendship Mabel and Pete share is not quite as it seems.
Ishaan’s death brings Mabel’s past back into public notoriety. At one of Mabel’s lowest points, a couple of young reporters contact her, wanting to tell her story, and reluctantly she agrees to be interviewed. As the novel segues from the past to the present, Mabel is forced to confront the ghosts of her past, and to look at the odd fact that as well as the murder of which she was found guilty, several people close to her also died.
Was it coincidence, or did she do it? Even Mabel isn’t sure, and gradually, as the wall she’s built up around herself begins to crumble, Mabel admits that her parents may have had more than a little cause and effect on her life.
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Hepworth is a clever writer, and as she gradually softens her main character, we soften towards her as well. It’s an art writing a character who at 15 was convicted of murder, and when she was released, spent the rest of her life building walls to keep everyone out.
Hepworth gradually gives Mabel the complexity and richness that allows us to feel compassion for her, and the somewhat bizarre trajectory of her life, which leads her to the unravelling of her past mysteries.
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