He tried to invest in marijuana farms.

Q. Your main character was not only dead, but he also comes across as extremely unpleasant. Was it tough to write about him?

I heard all the stories about Tushar, but wanted to step back and make sure that I was not biasing myself with negativity around the guy – but I am governed by the facts.

I did try to present him in the round. We’re all complicated people, but I’ve got to just kind of write it the way it happened. He’s kind of at war with himself a lot of times. And he’s kind of coming from outside cannabis – he’s kind of a square but likes the adrenaline of being on the edge. So I wanted to capture that element. Hopefully, people can see that suddenly being in the cannabis world would create a kind of paranoia.

He was disliked to the extreme and tried to venture into an industry riddled with drug gangsters.

Q. It reads like “Murder on the Orient Express,” where there were so many people who might want Tushar dead. But you knew who had been arrested from the start. How did that influence the book?

I hadn’t really thought about this until just now, but the fact that they had four people in jail awaiting trial freed me up to do more reporting and not get carried away with the whodunit. It freed up my subjects too, because they weren’t suspects anymore.

I never had access to the detectives because the cases are ongoing, but I could build all of the police procedural chapters out of court documents, which was a kind of map of how there were a lot of persons of interest and suspects, so there was a kind of natural whodunit.