Description:
April Smith's first novel, North of Montana, garnered good reviews and marked her as a writer worth watching. In her second thriller, Be the One, she amply fulfills that promise. Cassidy Sanderson is a woman in a man's world: the only female scout in major-league baseball, Cassidy's not only a former star with a women's professional team but also the daughter of a legendary player and the sister of a promising pitcher who died too young. Baseball isn't just in Cassidy's blood, it's her whole life, and even the daily effort of constantly having to prove herself to her bosses in the L.A. Dodgers head office can't wear out her passion for the game. She's got a great double play going when she goes to the Dominican Republic and finds both a promising young player, Alberto Cruz, and a powerful, sexy American financier, Joe Galinis, who picks her up when the car carrying her and Cruz breaks down. But once she gets Alberto to training camp, the trouble that's followed her all the way from the Caribbean explodes in blackmail, extortion, and violence, with a mysterious vodou twist: The thing appears to be a Barbancourt rum bottle, you can see the lettering underneath the red cloth in which it has been tightly wrapped. Lashed to the neck with hundreds of turns of black thread are two pairs of scissors, open wide. Dangling off the bottom on multicolored strings is a bizarre fringe of razor blades that flash like silver teeth. Her partner says, "What is it? Some kind of punk thing?" "Gang thing?" Cassidy holds it very carefully. It spooks her in a deeply primitive way. Unlike the whimsical gourd with the belly-button mirror on her mantel, this bizarre construction is definitely broadcasting on an evil wavelength: the shape of the bottle like a human body. Smith's characters are sharply drawn, and she's firmly in command of her milieu: the day-to-day life of a baseball scout is brilliantly explicated, the pacing is expert, and the back-stories are well told in flashback. Cassidy is a fascinating woman--hard-working, hard-drinking, and wholly human and vulnerable. Even if you're not a baseball fan, you'll root for her to win. --Jane Adams
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