“Living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, birthplace of Mr. Potato Head, had its ups and downs. But this working-class city of seventy-two thousand on the Blackstone River was no one-spud wonder. It was also the minor-league home of one of the most storied teams in baseball.”

That team, of course, is our own PawSox and their star player, Ryan James, is on the fast track to Fenway Park as James Grippando’s tight, twisty thriller Intent to Kill (Harper, 356 pages, $25.95) opens. Then a tragic car accident that kills his wife and injures his daughter derails James’ once-promising career and sentences him to life as a Boston sports-talk-radio host.

Of course, if 790 The Score were still broadcasting, Grippando could have avoided Boston altogether. As it is, Intent to Kill still offers any number of familiar locales which alone make the book of interest here. But it’s also a very good mystery in its own right, intensely personal and at times gut-wrenching.

A coded tip on the third anniversary of his wife Chelsea’s death puts James on the trail of the truth behind her fatal crash. That trail, joined by the case’s kindly prosecutor Emma Carlisle, leads from Chelsea’s savant brother to a Kennedy-like family for whom cover-ups are a way of life.

Intent to Kill hums along like a sizzling fastball thrown straight and sure. With the demise of Showtime’s Brotherhood television series, we can only hope Grippando has plans to hit more mystery homeruns out of our own backyard park.

“Excuse me, Pendergast,” Detective Vincent D’Agosta challenges FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast early in Cemetery Dance (Grand Central, 435 pages, $26.99), “but I have to ask: You don’t really believe that stuff about oanga and zombiis?”

The answer, in the latest pulse-pounding thriller by writing partners Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, turns out to be yes. Never bashful about going where no writer has dared go before, Preston and Child blaze terrifying new territory in their neo-gothic Cemetery Dance. In lesser hands zombiis (the actual spelling), voodoo, and a mystical cult operating just outside of New York City would be a recipe for a credibility-straining disaster. Not so here.

“My dear Vincent,” Pendergast responds to his detective partner’s query, “I don’t believe anything. I am not a priest. I deal with evidence and probabilities, not beliefs.”

This odd law enforcement couple joins forces in the wake of the bizarre murder of their mutual friend (and demised series regular), New York Times reporter William Smithback. Bizarre because, by all accounts, Smithback was killed by a man who’d died two weeks before. That sets D’Agosta and Pendergast on the twisted trail of ritual sacrifices that leads them to the well-hidden doorstep of an ancient cult bringing voodoo magic into the modern world.

Plot machinations aside, the real beauty of Cemetery Dance lies in its unabashed homage to a form seldom dared since Arthur Conan Doyle pitted Sherlock Holmes’ eccentric brilliance against all manner of evildoers. Preston and Child have transferred the action from Victorian London to contemporary Manhattan and the result is nothing short of spectacular.

jonlandauthor@aol.com