Review: 'One' good story about baseball -- and crime

'Be the One'
By April Smith
Alfred A. Knopf
Fiction
336 pages

In this story: A craftily twisted plot Ambition, hopes, and a debt RELATED STORIES, SITES

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- When, you ask, will someone write a good book about women in baseball? The obvious answer is that there aren't too many women in baseball, so there aren't many stories about them. But there is at least one good story about women in baseball, and April Smith has written it.

"Be the One" is a good story, period. It has action, intrigue, romance, characters that come across as real people, and, of course, it has baseball. Cassidy Sanderson is the only woman scout in the major leagues. Her job is to find young ballplayers and sign them up with the Los Angeles Dodgers. During a trip to the Dominican Republic, she finds a prospect with the potential to be a star. She also finds a real estate developer with the potential to be the love of her life.

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What Cassidy doesn't know is that at some point during her brief Domincan sojourn, something went wrong. The first hint comes when the young athlete she brings back to the Dodgers starts getting threatening letters. Then she's attacked outside a restaurant during spring training. Then things start to go seriously awry.

Smith has constructed a craftily twisted plot for this, her second novel. She tells the story on two narrative tracks. She uses flashbacks to flesh out the events of the fateful Dominican Republic trip. She also employs an interesting device to delineate what's past and what's present. The flashbacks are written in past tense and the rest of the book is in present tense. It's a tricky technique, but Smith handles it with seeming ease.

She has an eye for the telling detail and a dry wit. They combine to make "Be the One" a quick read, without making it seem flimsy. The prose is muscular in a distinctly feminine way, as when she describes a meeting between her protagonist and the new man in her life at a cocktail party:

"Cassidy pauses at the threshold, watching how, with his ramrod posture and a now beguiling smile, he holds the attention of those even in the back of the room; they want something he's giving off, as if being touched by the magnetic force of his self-assurance could cause their own fragmented spirits to line up and be whole."

"Be the One" opens a door on an aspect of baseball that gets little attention. Its central character is a tangle of complexities, pulled by her ambition, pushed by a need to validate her father's hopes for her, and weighed down by a debt she feels to a dead brother. Meeting Cassidy Sanderson is reason enough to pick up the book. The reader might figure out the major plot twist a few pages before Smith gets to it, but the ending provides a satisfying surprise of its own.

April Smith is a veteran of advertising and network television. Her credits include "Lou Grant" and "Chicago Hope." "Be the One," like those shows, is smartly written with characters the reader can care about. The book is a suitable companion to these waning days of the baseball season. It's as tautly suspenseful as a pitcher's duel, and as engrossing as Game Seven of the World Series.

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Alfred A. Knopf (Random House)

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