Elsie lives on a short street in a dicey neighborhood where she knows a bit more than she wants to about her neighbors. She and her best friend hang out and talk smack and interact fairly appropriately to the world around them. The neighbors know just what Elsie wants them to know about her until the day that her nemesis (he has a yappy dog that he doesn't train and he lives next door, you'd hate him too) drops dead and she reports his death and the world finds out that she is actually Mad Mabel, the youngest woman ever convicted of murder in Australia. Oh, it gets REAL good REAL fast!
There is the aforementioned yappy dog, a horrific elementary school aged child who has a single mom of questionable morals, a nice young man with a shopping problem, a real busybody and a married couple down the block who I kept thinking would play a bigger role in the story because Hepworth defines them so perfectly in her introduction. There are also flashbacks to what made Mabel so very, very mad that will make you very, very mad in return.
This is one of those old-people-need-community-and-the-less-they-think-they-do-,-the-more-important-it-is kind of books that Claire Pooley does so beautifully, but a little more murdery. Or that Jesse Q. Sutanto does but a little less investigative-y.
I am so sorry for all the dashes, I am not AI, I am just in absolute love with this book and this is how it expresses itself. I feel so sorry for you that you have to wait until April 21 to read it!
