The crisis starts with cannabis. At Detroit's Movement Festival, people collapse after eating THC gummies. Narcan doesn't work. Toxicology screens return nothing familiar. When investigators trace the product back to Tate Ramsey's indoor grow, it looks like a contained contamination event-until the same pattern appears in ordinary greens and produce across the country.
Industrial engineer Knox Ramsey, creator of FarmLytics-the most advanced agricultural optimization AI in America-is pulled in as the reluctant expert. What he finds is worse than any bad batch: someone has weaponized plant biology itself. By corrupting FarmLytics' growth algorithms, the attackers force crops to express lethal phenolic toxins as part of their natural defense chemistry, while the system generates clean, compliant audit trails.
FarmLytics wasn't just hacked. It was taught to lie. As casualties climb and harvest cycles close in, Knox is forced to work with his estranged son at ground zero of the first outbreak to hunt an invisible adversary using food, code, and bureaucracy as weapons.
Book 1 of the Knox Ramsey Thrillers,
Dark Recipe is a relentlessly grounded techno-thriller about food, code, and the terrifying fragility of systems we trust but don't really understand.
