Events

 Mark Haskell Smith, who “writes like Carl Hiassen’s oversexed cousin” (Booklist), is back with Baked, a charming comic suspense novel that is a hybrid cross-breed of The Big Lebowski and Half Baked with The Orchid Thief and Weeds thrown in.   With marijuana well on its way to being legalized in California, Smith takes on the subject of cannabis with typically oddball results. Meet Miro Basinas, an experimental botanist, a gentleman farmer who sells his rarefied product to an educated clientele. Only he’s not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine – he’s growing weed. His greatest creation, a blend called Elephant Crush that tastes like mangoes, has his loyal customers, who need medical marijuana for their anxiety disorders and restless leg syndrome, clamoring for more. Months earlier, Miro had entered Elephant Crush in Amsterdam’s prestigious Cannabis Cup and won, but upon his return to Los Angeles, he is shot and his weed is taken, in a brutal blow to ganjaficionados everywhere.   Baked, complete with a typically Smith-ian cast of lovably quirky characters, takes readers on a truly hilarious ride through LA, the world of medical marijuana and competitive pot-growing, all while trying to solve the mystery of who shot Miro and trying to recover the fabled Elephant Crush.   Mark Haskell Smith is an award-winning screenwriter and author of three prior novels, Moist, Delicious, and Salty. He covered the real Cannabis Cup for the Los Angeles Times last fall, and as California speeds towards the ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, he has fashioned himself into a kind of expert on the state’s number one crop. He lives in Los Angeles, close to the Rambo taco truck.