San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Topical thriller focuses on Humboldt pot trade
The California drug trade has inspired potent books. Early in his career, T.C. Boyle scored with “Budding Prospects,” the picaresque tale of Northern California naifs turned wannabe cannabis kings. In surf-noir novels like “Savages,” Don Winslow supplies readers with THCfueled crime sagas that reveal affluent Southern California as alluring, brutal and corrupt.
Now Dale Maharidge — a veteran journalist and Columbia University professor whose 1990 book, “And Their Children After Them,” earned a nonfiction Pulitzer Prize — takes his shot with “Burn Coast,” set among the redwoods and marijuana patches of Humboldt County.
“Burn Coast” is a rangy, topical thriller that charts the conflicts that erupt when a region dependent on momand-pop pot growers confronts the new world of legal marijuana and big-bucks, large-scale producers.
The prologue explains that “the Burn Coast” draws its name from the controlled fires its Native American inhabitants employed to ensure the survival of the valuable tan oak. Those native inhabitants have mostly vanished, slaughtered by 19th century white settlers. In their place are refugees from mainstream America, escapees from former lives, seekers of off-the-grid autonomy and the chance to grow $1,500-apound sinsemilla.
The novel’s cast of characters is vivid and varied. There’s the story’s protagonist, a reporter-professor Maharidge stand-in named Will Specter. There’s his pal Likowski, a successful grower with a signature strain named “Death Wish” who didn’t get the memo about not getting high on your own supply. There’s a sinister Bulgarian weed baron. And there’s Zoe, a 70-ish sprite who plays her tuba while gazing out to the sea.
Zoe’s sudden disappearance sets the book in motion. Did she flee the coast or was she killed? Why? The mystery triggers Will’s newshound instincts, and so he begins to dig into Zoe’s tangled past. (Likowski, likewise, has a secret history.) All the while, we discover that the Bulgarian weed baron seems to be behind every real estate transaction for 50 miles.
Maharidge lived part time in the Humboldt County town of Petrolia for many years, and he clearly knows the coast like a local. He’s good at painting its strenuous beauty — the fog tendrils wrapping the redwoods, the Pacific breakers smashing against the rocky shore. But he’s equally good at explaining the economic realities behind large-scale marijuana production, and he shows how those realities have turned the coast toxic. The Burn Coast may look like a haven for seekers of peace and love, but today its flower children are mostly “gnarly homeless dudes,” he writes, with its cute hippie shops “pandering cynical fronts for washing black-market weed money.”
Given its crowd of characters and its leaps in time, “Burn Coast” meanders some. But it regains momentum at its end, with more deaths and a final fire. “Maybe we were our own worst enemy,” a mourner grieves at a memorial service. “Where did we fail? What went wrong?” That’s the question that haunts Will Specter, and will no doubt linger with the reader, at “Burn Coast’s” close.