21. Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

listened on Libby

352 pgs.

2025
Mystery Thriller/CRF
Finished 5/12/2026
Goodreads rating: 4.37
My rating: 5
Setting: small community in Melbourne, Australia (with flashbacks to the 1950s)

My comments: What a wonderful, engrossing novel!  The characters were well-written and (mostly) endearing, the story held enough mystery to keep you interested and guessing, and the flipping back in forth in time helped SHOW instead of tell the story.  Three cheers!

Goodreads synopsis: 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?

MOVIE - State of Play

Very good-suspenseful with a twist at the end
Viewed Thursday, 5/14/09 at El Con with Sheila
Drama 1:58 PG-13
Released 4-17-09
RT: 85% cag: 75%
Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams
Director: Kevin Macdonald
aslo: Robin Wright Penn, Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman, Jeff Daniels

Russell Crowe plays a scruffy investigative reporter for the Washington Globe. Ben Affleck plays an up-and-coming congressman who is in charge of a committee questioning defense spending. When the married Afleck is discovered to be having an affair with an assistant, new Globe online reporter Rachel McAdams jumps in. We soon discovere that the journalist and politician were college roommates with a lot of baggage - the congressman's wife being one of them. The major plotline is about the shady insider dealings of more-or-less legal hitmen while a parallel plotline is about the intertwining lives and lies of the protagonists.

Rachel McAdams's part was sort of weird, she's not a major player, she's not a strong journalist, but a bond forms between her and Russell Crowe, which is kind of sweet, but somewhat out-of-character....a weak , somewhat questionable, link for me.