Ivy Is a Weed

Roseth, a former university news and information director, puts his decades of experience with academia to fine use in his debut, a campus mystery. Former reporter Mike Woodsen, now the public information officer for an unnamed Pacific Northwest university, is roused in the middle of the night by the school’s police after Jeremy Ronson, “Vice President for Strategic Infrastructure Support and Vice Provost for Systems Design and Integration,” takes a fatal fall from his fourth-floor office window. The haste with which the coroner rules the death accidental arouses Woodsen’s journalistic instincts, and he begins poking around to determine whether Ronson, considered by some an incompetent jerk, was pushed. His suspicions increase when he makes an unauthorized visit to the dead man’s office and finds evidence of a struggle. Roseth keeps the whodunit plot moving briskly while tweaking modern collegiate bureaucracies (the Content Approbation department monitors the shades of the university’s colors, blue and yellow, used in published materials and mandates that telephone number digits be separated only by periods—“certainly not commas”—in emails). Fans of Kelly Brakenhoff’s Dead Week will clamor for more. (Self-published)