Matt McAvoy Book Review

If you’ve ever wondered how academics justify their existence, then Ivy is a Weed by Robert M. Roseth is the murder mystery for you.  Set within a university in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, the novel is sophisticated yet still on planet Earth, and the plotting is as finely crafted as any novel I have read by well-known crime writers.  One cares about the protagonist Mike Woodsen, university reporter turned amateur sleuth, so it is a rewarding journey taken with him to investigate his suspicions that the police have too hastily brushed aside a campus murder as merely an accident.  Woodsen suspects that this was a ‘defenestration’, an idiosyncratic term which is nicely employed to answer the question: did Jeremy Ronson fall from his office window or was he pushed? 

The novel does a great deal to debunk the myth of universities as hallowed halls of learning; dusty academics; ‘articulate defender[s] of the arcane’, without accountability to the real world but delivering, nevertheless, withering replies to lesser mortals.  The plot is densely layered and the author has considerable knowledge of the ICT industry, university funding, the manipulation of social media and the sinister implications for people who question the system.  Woodsen’s investigations seem an innocent obsession, until one dark night they suddenly pose a more personal threat.

Roseth is such a fine writer that I was interested to learn that Ivy is a Weed is his first novel, though not too happy to recall that Sydney University when I went there was covered in ivy.  Should I be worried?

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