Cay Morgan is beautiful, smart and she’s out for revenge. Since the Trader left his mark on her, she’s been determined to show him she won’t just duck out his way. She’s going to find the Trader and she’s going to have her revenge. And now, she’s getting close, perhaps a little close for the Trader’s comfort…

This reprint of Wade Miller’s fast paced thriller – its first time in print for over forty years – is yet another excellent choice by the editor’s of Hard Case Crime. With its tough protagonist, simple yet elegant prose and terrifically choreographed set-pieces, Branded Woman hardly feels dated and still reads at one hell of a lick, engrossing the reader from its opening words through to its surprising and yet somehow inevitable end.

As ever, with Hardcase books, we must take time to commend them on another amazing cover. With Cay seated before us, sexy and dangerous, it’s a terrific looking piece of art, ensuring we know Hardcase aren’t lie any other publisher out there.

For a book that’s around fifty years old, Branded Woman hasn’t shown any real signs of aging. With its tough female protagonist – whose burnt emotions feel more real to this reviewer than many of the supposedly “spunky” women present in the work of modern writers – the book doesn’t alienate a modern audience with too many obvious outdated female ideals. Perhaps there is something odd – and more than a little influenced by patriarchal attitudes of the time – in Cay’s sometimes seemingly desparate need to find love (and the way she gushes upon finally finding a man she feels won’t betray her, a man to whom she feels she can belong reads a little off-pat to a modern audience) but as a character who is perfectly capable of surviving without men she feels surprisingly modern, albeit more in line with darker female noir than the currently fashionable marriage of “chick lit” and crime. One can trace a line to early Scarpetta or VI Warshawski from Cay. She’s no-nonsense, perfectly capable of holding her own in a man’s world. While the traditional view of the forties female criminal is that of the femme-fatale, Cay escapes that archetype, being as much of an anti-hero as any noir hero while maintaining her femininity and becoming more than just a male archetype in drag.

It is this archetypical reversal that gives the book its power. While most noir or hardboiled heroes may be searching for a pure woman, someone untouched by the dark world they inhabit, Cay finds herself attracted to the one man removed from the violence of the criminal underworld inhabited by both Cay and her nemesis, The Trader. This romantic subplot – which dovetails beautifully into the main action – is occasionally overplayed but considered the nature of Cay’s malady – she has become so immersed in the dark world of her criminality she feels as though she has lost some integral part of herself – one can forgive the occasionally melodramatic moments Cay experiences.

With Cay being the main focus of Branded Woman, one could expect the supporting cast to fall by the wayside. For the most part, they are seldom explored in any great depth, yet even the broad sketches Miller presents us with are brimming with energy and life.Of all the supporting cast, it is the Trader – who is physically little more than a shadow falling across the lives of all the characters in this novel – who feels the most real. While he is a villain in the most grand tradition of villains, like Moriarty or Blofeld, he feels grounded and plausible. A forerunner of the mysterious Keyser Soze, he exists more as a legend than a man and yet, like Cay, you know he exists, you can sense him round the next corner.

Just as important as any of the characters is the backdrop to this tale of revenge, the city of Mazatlan in Mexico. Miller paints the backdrop beautifully, and one gets a real sense of place. From the hotel rooms to the local bullfighting arena, which is little more than demarked patch of ground, one gets a sense of the mix poverty and beauty inherent in this locale.

For all of this, all the depth to this book, Miller knows what he is writing and his prose runs at breakneck speed, the plot twisting and turning this way and that. Events never slow and even when the characters get a chance to breathe, the reader senses this respite is only temporary. No one can try to take out a man like the Trader and expect it to be easy.

With a complex protagonist, brilliantly choreographed action, a spectacular backdrop and prose that holds you at gunpoint until you’ve finished the final page, Branded Woman is pulp perfection. Back in print and with a perfect publisher, Branded Woman is both a brilliant slice of crime fiction history and a story that feels just as exciting and gripping – maybe more so – as it did back in 1952, upon its first release.