Despite the skunky haze of marijuana drifting through every chapter, E.R. Brown’s debut crime thriller is less a book about drugs and more about what happens when the desire for money and respect lure innocent people into dangerous worlds.

Our narrator is 17-year-old Tate Mac-Lane who, despite graduating high school three years early, is stuck whipping up lattes at a coffee shop called Human Beans, a “dumpy little place” in the fictional town of Wallace, B.C. Tate’s mother, Beth, is a painter and cancer survivor; his sister, Bree, a 14-year-old loner with a sketchy older boyfriend. With Beth’s career in decline and his father out of the picture, Tate is left as the family’s primary breadwinner.

Enter Randle Kennedy, the ponytailed operator of countless marijuana grow-ops in town. Kennedy produces everything from medical marijuana to drug-laced street pot to subtly flavoured “boutique” weed. Impressed with young Tate’s macchiato skills and grace under pressure at Human Beans, Kennedy convinces the teenager to be his delivery boy, making pickups and drop-offs within Southern B.C.’s densely interconnected pot network and, occasionally, across the border into the U.S.

Tate and Kennedy develop a Jim Hawkins/Long John Silver kind of relationship, with Kennedy filling the role of the charismatic father-figure Tate can’t quite trust, and Tate as the wunderkind protégé who’s just too “good” to be bad. When Tate learns that Kennedy is double-crossing a local biker gang, which acts as protection for his operation in exchange for loyalty and a cut of the profits, Tate realizes he needs to take his money and run to keep himself and his family safe.

Brown’s plot moves slowly at first, then picks up speed in the final third. The book is impeccably researched but occasionally plodding, with too many interesting yet undeveloped threads peppered throughout (Beth’s mysterious involvement in one of Kennedy’s grow-ops, for example, or Tate’s complex relationship with his possibly gay girlfriend, Rachel). Like a first joint rolled by an enthusiastic but rookie toker, Almost Criminal grips loosely but can’t quite hold together.