Mad Mabel

If you loved The Maid, you will love this. Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is a cantankerous eighty-one-year-old living in a quiet suburb of Melbourne. She loves her life, her street, and even some of her rather annoying neighbors. But when one of them (her nemesis!) turns up dead, the past that Elsie worked so hard to conceal gets dug up. You see, when Elsie was fifteen, she was known as “Mad Mabel,” the youngest convicted murderer in Australia. As Elsie finds herself a suspect in her neighbor’s death, she has to make a decision: will she finally share her side of the story? The book alternates between modern day and the fifties, where Mabel grew up as the town pariah with negligent parents and (thankfully) an amazing aunt. It’s one of those rare cozy mysteries that’s also very heartwarming. I couldn’t put it down, and I loved all of the characters. Grumpy Elsie, her Aldi-obsessed neighbor Peter, seven-year-old Persephone, suspicious Joan . . . they were all lovely in their own ways, and very memorable.