The 1976 Club - Alas for her that met me!

Firstly - and I have to point this out - how 1970s is this cover? Check out the eyeliner and pencil thin eyebrows - and the hair. Incidentally the author is very clear in the text that the heroine has the carefully arranged curls fashionable to the time the book is set and one of the plot points is the use of arsenic to whiten the skin. 

Moving on to the book itself Mary Ann Ashe, as the blurb tells us, is the pseudonym of a bestselling author of women's fiction, and Alas for her that met me! is the first in a series. 

In fact the author was better known as Christianna Brand. It's a shame in a way that I knew this as I've read two of Christianna Brand's mystery novels from earlier years - Green for Danger and Death in High Heels - and Alas has suffered badly by comparison. 

Set in the mid 1800s and based on a real trial, the story centres around two sisters still in their teens. Both young ladies, although descended from trade (the snobbery in this book is very well done) they are not supposed to notice strange men or somehow contrive an acquaintance with them, and yet not only do they both hanker after the same unknown man they have seen on the street, but the eldest, Adelina, actually manages to meet him and fall deeper and deeper into what, for the time, would have been scandalous behaviour, while he - the reader is privy to his thoughts - only has his eye on her father's money. 

Too late Adelina realises not only the danger she has placed herself in, but how much harm she has done her sister by leading her astray, and she scolds herself (repeatedly to the point where it becomes really quite tiresome) about how sweet and innocent her sister used to be and how it's all her fault she's not any more. 

I won't spoiler the book by writing too much more. The story drags a little but steers us nicely through the shadows growing round the two sisters and the contrast with the carefree life they should have had, but I would have preferred that there hadn't been a spoiler in the blurb, or a foreshadowing of the death of one of the main characters in the text - I think it would have been better to come to the story not knowing, as Adelina doesn't in the beginning, exactly where her foolishness will lead.

This review is for the 1976 club, which is run by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, where they focus on one year every six months. Check out the post here for more 1976 reviews.