Baked

Miro Basinas is an experimental botanist-part mad scientist, part gentleman farmer-who sells his rarefied product to a discerning clientele. Only he's not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine- he's growing weed. And when Miro hits the big time by winning Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup, cannasseurs and ganjaficionados aren't the only people who want a piece of him and his mind-blowing pot that tastes like mangoes.

The latest wickedly funny crime novel from Mark Haskell Smith, Baked opens with a bang as Miro is cut down by a bullet. A mild-mannered hipster who doesn't know the first thing about revenge-or even who shot him-Miro is soon on a quest to recover his prize invention and to secure his place as the Floyd Zaiger (creator of the pluot) of weed. It's a journey packed with a delicious cast of charac ters, including a string-theory obsessed cop, a paramedic with a kinky streak, a Mormon missionary struggling to keep his "sap" under control in a city that is the personification of sex, a half-Irish half-Salvadoran drug dealer and his dim-witted associates, the owner of a taco truck, a cougar starlet, and an entrepreneur who wants to turn his medical marijuana Compassion Centers into the Starbucks of pot. Baked is a hilarious, rip-roaring romp from a talented, utterly original novelist.