A Killing in Cannabis

A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed

SPIEGEL & GRAU, FEBRUARY 3, 2026

A shocking murder at the nexus of Silicon Valley, California surf culture, and the cannabis gold rush exposes the dark side of the legal weed business in this revelatory work of investigative journalism.

Santa Cruz is one of the country’s surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite. For decades, marijuana has been cultivated, consumed, and trafficked in these mountains, one of the most important regions in the country for the crop. It’s where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties, where back-to-the-land types came to live off the grid, and where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley founder, was found brutally murdered.

Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs and venture capitalists with a voracious appetite for risk, work, and money, riding waves at dawn and then putting in fourteen-hour days. When he met Rachael Lynch, a maverick cannabis grower and mover of product, he had a vision of how their lives could come together in business and in love. Atre sought to disrupt the newly legal cannabis trade by funding a start-up with black market capital. This illegal pursuit would entangle him with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom had compelling reason to want him dead.

Award-winning journalist Scott Eden’s panoramic investigation exposes the symbiotic relationship between the legal weed world and its shadowy, illegal counterpart. It is a story of love, greed, and betrayal, set in a world where visionaries, hippies, masters of the universe, and stone-cold killers are all stakeholders, eager to exploit the power of the plant.

“A Killing in Cannabis is three books in one. First, it’s a murder mystery that would work even if every word was made up. Next, it’s a deeply reported literary non-fiction masterpiece, as if Robert Caro reported a story written by Colum McCann. It’s a book that inhabits the subculture of illegal and legal weed, of the last tracer afterglow of whatever good was happening in San Francisco in the 1960s, before it turned sour, connecting Neal Cassady to El Chapo, and the Acid Tests to violence, venture capitalism, and greed. Which brings me to the third book: Scott Eden has written a parable, the best book about the moral and ethical soul of Silicon Valley, a story about how the American dream of Go West, Young Man, has delivered us to this moment of postmodern nihilism called America in 2026. The years do, as the song says, melt. But not into a dream. Into a nightmare. This book—these books—are the chronicle of that long slide into darkness.”—Wright Thompson, author of the New York Times bestseller The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi