Killer Weed

Murders, mystery and marijuana in present day San Francisco, with ties to the Haight-Ashbury past.

Financial ruin threatens longtime stoner and historian-turned-journalist Ed Rosenberg. He and his wife, Julie, victims of newspapers’ decline, have just been fired from the San Francisco Foghorn.

Scrambling for work, Ed lands a gig researching the hippie Haight-Ashbury for a museum exhibit sponsored by a tech billionaire whose birth mother was a small-time marijuana dealer shot to death in Golden Gate Park in 1968, a killing never solved. Meanwhile, Julie is hired as media liaison for mayoral candidate Dave Kirsch, a former pot dealer and author of best-selling guides to growing weed. Then Kirsch is murdered in Golden Gate Park. His death costs Julie her job and returns the couple to the brink of financial disaster.

Ed’s research about the hippie Haight-Ashbury’s tie-dyed past vividly illuminates that era. The derivation of “psychedelic”? How the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane got their names? All that and more in Killer Weed. Ed’s investigation also introduces him to a rogue’s gallery of characters—a hairdresser, florist, laundromat operator, and real estate mogul— who, he realizes, may have been involved in the ex-dealer’s murder. Then someone starts shooting at him.

The pages turn quickly and San Francisco—both then and now— comes alive. Killer Weed features remarkably true-to-life characters, and a compelling, nuanced portrait of a marriage under duress. Their careers upended, Ed and Julie feel anxious and stressed—and both use drugs to cope. He smokes more weed, which she doesn’t like, and she drinks more alcohol, which he can’t stand. Will the marriage survive?