Who would think to put baseball, voodoo, drug dealing former Dominican generals and capitalist corruption together into a neat, taut thriller? The answer is April Smith, whose book, "Be the One," not only blends those elements seamlessly but adds to the mix a sexy, athletic, adventurous, mistake-prone female protagonist named Cassidy Sanderson, who is one of the better things to happen to the thriller genre since Peter Hoeg gave us Smilla of the sense of snow.
   Cassidy is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, which is a novel and creative occupation for a 35-year-old woman who, if she had not been a woman, would have been a baseball phenomenon, a hall of famer. In fact Cassidy's older brother and best friend, Gregg, was a phenomenon, but his life was cut short by cystic fibrosis when he was a teenager, so Cassidy's determination to succeed man's world has an odor of vindication about it.
   But Cassidy's career, hemmed in good-natured sexism that is subtly and skillfully portrayed by Ms. Smith, is on the edge. She failed to sign her two best prospects, which stigmatized her as unproductive. "My life is pathetic," she tells the bartender at Papa's, the Los Angeles bar where she hangs out until the wee hours one night getting drunk.
   But that very night she gets a call from the Dodgers' scout in the Dominican Republic who tells her that he has found the future Willie Mays in a small town there, and he tells her to fly down the next day. Cassidy shouldn't do that. It's not her territory, and she doesn't have authorization, but she goes anyway. (She had to; if she hadn't, there would be no story.) She meets 18-year-old Alberto Cruz, signs him and quickly returns home.
   All of this happens in Ms. Smith's first few pages, which is one of the many virtues of "Be the One." There is no throat clearing in this novel, which clips along at a steady trotter's pace from its very beginning. Other virtues: Ms. Smith has taken the trouble to become familiar with several uncommon worlds, not least of them the world of baseball scouts and the front office of a major league team. The details here are hard to beat, like the story of the star player who reported his cleats missing, "only to have them surface several months later for sale in a collector's magazine, prompting one TV commentator to observe that twelve hundred bucks seemed a lot of pay for athlete's foot."
   Ms. Smith's police work is sharply etched and authentic. She handles downtown Los Angeles cocktail parties with the lawyer and developer elite as though she has spent her whole life going to them. And she has learned her voodoo. But at the center of it all is Cassidy herself, smart-alecky and tender at the same time and pretty lusty, too, but observant and possessed of all the warm female qualities, even if she grew up trying hard to be a boy like her brother.
   "Cassidy doesn't like police stations," Ms. Smith's narrator tells us at one point. "They reek of failure."
   That's not an important point, but it demonstrates Ms. Smith's writerliness. "Be the One" is a thriller with more than literary pretensions; it is literary.
   After Cassidy like a big-game hunter brings home Alberto, things start to unravel. Alberto gets notes from a village back home telling him to send $10,000 to an address in the Dominican Republic. Not long after that a bottle strung with razor blades, a voodoo object, is thrown through the windshield of Cassidy's Ford Explorer. Then she sees a similar bottle at a party in the Los Angeles home of a businessman she met on her short trip to the Dominican Republic, a smooth rich developer named Joe Galinis who becomes a key figure in the story.
   He seems to be a good guy, and, certainly, Cassidy falls for him. But there is something off about him that we the readers can see but that Cassidy cannot. The unexplained attempts at intimidation and extortion turn brutal when Cassidy is beaten up by two men in a parking lot at Dodgers' spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla.
   With each ominous event, Ms. Smith takes us on an italicized flash back to Cassidy's trip to the Dominican Republic, which turns out have been very eventful. At times the scaffolding of Ms. Smith's intrigue shows itself a bit too obviously, as when Cassidy suddenly remembers a crucial detail of a late-night car ride on that trip that there was no good reason for her not to have remembered earlier, other than M. Smith's interest in keeping us in suspense.
   Cassidy also follows the model of almost every main character in a most every thriller ever written, which is that she goes places on he own when any idiot would know to go to the police. There is a shootout near the end of the book that is more than a touch implausible. -
   Still, the police do enter the picture effectively, particularly in the fort of a clever, attractive Florida detective named Nate Allen, who almost steals the show in Ms. Smith's final chapters. Meanwhile Ms. Smith' brisk pacing never slows, nor does her characters' sharp dialogue dull. Her ending, which has a Graham Greene touch of chilly exoticism, draws together all the elements; Cassidy's recollections of her trip to sign up Alberto, Alberto himself, Joe, Nate and a couple of creepy hoodlums whom Cassidy first encountered In the Dominican Republic.
   In short Ms. Smith has produced tingling and pungent entertainment, anchored in good characters and authentic-seeming situations. Her first novel, "North of Montana," was greeted by critics as a promising beginning. "Be the One," as they say of ballplayers past their rookie seasons, shows that she is no flash in the pan.

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