Red Witch of Mercury

Jaro Moynahan has killed his way across a hundred worlds. They call him when death needs a professional touch, when the job requires someone who understands the finality of a trigger pull. But on Mercury, where the sun is a relentless hammer and the mining colonies seethe with revolt, he finds something he never expected: a cause worth dying for. The planet is a pressure cooker. Corporate overlords squeeze the miners for every ounce of quicksilver while a revolution simmers in the shadow of the solar furnaces. Into this tinderbox rides Moynahan, hired for one job but caught in another entirely. Miss Mikail, a red-haired singer with eyes like emeralds and rumors of witchcraft clinging to her like perfume, threatens to unravel everything. She sees something in the gunman that he has spent decades denying: a man capable of something other than death. At a scant sixty pages, this is pulp fiction operating at maximum density. McDowell stuffs revolution, political intrigue, hardboiled atmosphere, and a haunted protagonist into a rocket-short frame. The prose crackles with mid-century SF's brutal efficiency. It's a space western in the truest sense: a story about a man who has made killing his profession discovering he might have a soul worth saving.