Amazon.com Review
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
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Cassidy Sanderson, the 35-year-old heroine of Smith's (North of Montana) tough, smart novel, is a baseball scout for the L.A. DodgersDthe only woman scout in the major leagues in 1994. On a hot tip from her godfather, Pedro, a "successful bird-dog scout, " she goes to the Dominican Republic in pursuit of a young center fielder named Alberto Cruz. During this unauthorized trip, she meets Joe Galinis, a downtown-L.A. developer to whom she is immediately drawn. She and Joe, along with Alberto, drive drunk into a hurricane, and a confusing accident in the violent murky weather (related in interspersed flashbacks) yields misfortune that follows them back to Los Angeles. As Cassidy gets Alberto into training in California, the action, somewhat sluggish at the outset, quickens: Alberto and Joe receive anonymous blackmail notes, and Cassidy runs into danger on a trip to view spring training in Vero Beach, Fla. The Dodgers and the L.A. and Vero Beach police departments get involved, which stands to jeopardize the careers of Alberto, Joe and CassidyDas well as the romance developing between the latter two. To Cassidy, baseball is more than business: formerly a pro softball player, she has always been a pioneer; in addition, she's living out the expectations of her beloved, deceased brother. Befriended in Vero Beach by detective Nate Allen, who later ends up in L.A. on official business, she faces a host of difficult decisions. Smith's characters are hard to empathize withDCassidy, in particular, keeps her game face so assiduously that the reader only sometimes glimpses her vulnerabilitiesDand a major leap in determining the blackmailer's motive isn't confirmed until the end, which threatens the story's plausibility. While the writing is generally firm and judicious, Smith's prose sometimes swerves into the overly ornate. But this ambitious novel, much to its credit, does venture beyond these ambivalences to provocatively rephrase the perennial tale of a woman in a man's world. 75,000 first printing. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
