“She had come to Mazatlán to kill a man.”

She is Cay Morgan, and the man is The Trader. And she’s waited five years to kill him! But then...

“All she had ever wanted…Except that she wanted Walt more.” Yeah, well that kind of killed it for me. Cay went from a vengeful take-no-prisoners warrior type to a mushy, romantic, sentimental type in one night. It was such a drastic switch that it jarred me right out of the story. The stunning last sentence of the book was awesome, but having the main character change that dramatically, that quickly, just didn't work for me. ( )

I will give anything with the Hard Case Crime imprint a chance, so when I saw this one among the many books at one of my local library sales, I immediately grabbed it. To make it more interesting, the book actually follows a female lead, unlike so many stories from the time that would have told Cay's stories through the eyes of the gumshoe she hired, in this case a man by the name of George Hodd.

However, this story is entirely Cay Morgan's, and it's one of cold, calculated revenge. Five years ago she was "taught a lesson" by a mysterious man known only as "The Trader." She has spent those five years searching, and now she has her first lead, the man who sold her out to the Trader is in Mazatlan, and she doesn't plan on letting him get away from her again. Of course, things aren't going to be all that easy for Cay, and there are more things at play here than she knows. So who will get to who first?

This is a tense, tightly written tale, making it hard to put down once you start. And the ending is quite the reveal. ( )

One of the stronger reissues of the original Hard Case Crime series, Branded Woman is one of those deceptively simple Fawcett Gold Medal-type crime / revenge thrillers that fly by when you read them; you have to slow down a little, or perhaps know a fair modicum of something about writing yourself, to see the work and skill that went into it.

Wade Miller was the pseudonym of Robert Allison “Bob” Wade and H. Bill Miller, the same team who wrote, under the name of Whit Masterson, the novel Badge of Evil, which was the basis of the 1958 Orson Welles movie Touch of Evil.

The authors tipped their hands a bit here by having their protagonist, Catherine ("Cay") Morgan -- an international jewel smuggler just past 30 who is waging a private vendetta against a fellow smuggler known only as The Trader, whose goons branded a letter "T" on her forehead five years ago when she didn't have the good sense to be warned off of a score that The Trader wanted -- recite, in English, a bit of Roman verse. (Since, at the time that I read this, I happened to have been trying to wrap my thoughts around the first five books of Livy that I had recently finished, began reading H.J. Rose's Ancient Roman Religion [1948] and resumed picking my way through H.L. Havell's Republican Rome, one may imagine that this bit of authorial grandstanding greatly appealed to me, and sold me on Cay's character more than her simple desire for revenge did.) The ending was a double-reveal -- I'd guessed the first revelation, but not the second -- and had a very realistic "revenge-from-beyond-the-grave" bit that does not bode well for Cay (the book is, at minimum, set in the early 1950s, if not the late 1940s) or her future offspring.

Branded Woman is a definite keeper. ( )

A great Hard Case offering. It turns the old noir stories on their ear a bit by having a female lead.