3 out of 5

HCC 011

‘Branded Woman’ just has the feel of a classic pulp – it conjures to mind skinny-cigarette smoking villains, curvy dames, and people use things like blackjacks, and it all reads true to the time, not just like a tribute to the genre.  It’s a good story, too, a revenge tale mixed with mystery, where the person our lead is after is a big question mark.  But Wade Miller’s approach is one of perpetual delay – this HCC book took my much longer to read than most because it kept feeling like the story was never beginning, even though it begins from page one.

We arrive in Mexico with our leading lady, who we’re told is a thief-extraordinaire-for-hire, and she’s being eyeballed on the flight over by several dastardly people.  The police?  Maybe it’s just because she’s beautiful, which we’re told from the get-go also, and Miller, writing from an omniscient – but mostly from her – perspective, adds believability to it – it’s not just another empty picture of a pretty dame; he finds a good balance in her voice of someone who knows she’s attractive and knows how to use that, but is aware of the emptiness of it at the same time, and a lifetime of having to deal with approaches along those lines.  When she deplanes and is stalked – and eventually attacked – by one of these shady characters – we start to get more pieces of the puzzle, that she’s in Mexico to stalk and perhaps kill “The Trader,” a fellow criminal (higher up in the food chain, perhaps) who crossed her in a most nefarious way at some point.  Not to point too obviously to it, but Miller does a good job of revealing the motivations of our lead (Cay) in an effective way, and through her continual double-handling of men as potential sexual objects and objects of social manipulation, the concept of the title takes on a nice layered meaning.

There’s a good gallery of characters here – a detective assisting Cay, a sailor love interest, some random criminal elements – all given distinctive traits that make them memorable and stick out in the plot, which is something lacking in even the most basic 3-character tales sometimes.  And the twist of mixing revenge with no one knowing exactly who “The Trader” is (Cay never saw him, just knew she was dealing with him) gives the initial front half of the book a nice sense of urgency, as we join Cay on her one and only lead to this character, after years of searching, and even that carries a timetable, as he’ll be departing Mexico after the weekend…

But – despite this mixture of good elements, Miller stabs the pacing in the foot with some simple missteps: first is that feeling I mention of the book never really starting.  It’s hard to say why this is, but it seems to be because we never really get a proper introduction to Kay.  I could tell more that she was a thief by the blurb on the back of the book than by anything actually in the text.  And because she’s based around manipulating people, although Miller gives us a couple characters with whom she’s supposedly playing honestly, the omniscient narrator is really only giving us at-the-moment thoughts, which involve Cay playing things close to the vest.  So although her voice is true, and the story starts in an appropriate spot, she is neither mysterious enough to act as a nameless noir lead or explained enough for us to be on her side.  Thus when the details about the Why of her being there are revealed, they are interesting, but still don’t really feel like the beginning of any proper story because we’ve not latched on to anyone as our guide.  Also, the timetable element is dialed back a bit about halfway through the book (everything feels like a rush and then suddenly we’re sleeping for a night), so we sort of get the feeling like we’re being set up for a twist and, sure enough, we are.  Miller does quite a bit of back-pedaling at the story’s conclusion, which is sort of par for this genre, but it’s a shame that it slows down for a good chunk of pages before getting there.

“Branded” is by no means bad – it’s still more real to the form than a lot of the modern day pulp pap, it just has a few quirks that are inserted by narrative choices that inadvertently get in the way of it being a more compelling read.