Left on Rancho

Auteur

Francesco Paola was born in Turin, Italy, and was raised in Italy, Thailand, and Australia before moving to the US, where he earned an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is an accomplished technology entrepreneur, and from 2019 to 2021 worked at a legal cannabis startup in California while on a sabbatical from tech. He has written technical blogs, white papers, and articles for over twenty-five years as an executive in the tech-startup ecosystem. He and his wife, the novelist Jackie Townsend, have called New York City home since 1999.

Texte du rabat

For fans of Tod Goldberg and Tim O’Brien, this debut contemporary noir follows a burned-out tech entrepreneur into the Wild West of California cannabis and the converging worlds of contraband weed and illegal immigration.

There are only two reasons to take a left on Rancho: cannabis and immigration.

October 2019. Adelanto, a desolate outpost in the Mojave Desert. Andrew Eastman, a tech entrepreneur with a bank account running on fumes, rides into town to help an old friend. The ask: turn around a fledgling legal weed operation in the California High Desert, where a dead “desert walker” is just another day in Adelanto, according to the local sheriff. Where coyotes “help” migrants escape from the ICE detention center nearby as protests ignite around it. Where no one cares about illegal marijuana because the pie’s big enough for everyone.

Andrew, the outsider, asks too many questions—the viability of the legal market, cannabis’s social impact, inoperative surveillance cameras in the factory, and the dominance of the illegal trade. An illegal trade run by unscrupulous actors.

On a hunt for contraband that’s based on a stolen formulation, Andrew journeys from Adelanto to West Hollywood to the underbelly of Los Angeles, until he lands at the intersection of cannabis and immigration. Bodies pile up around him. And when tragedy strikes, Andrew’s left with one last decision, one that will forever change him.