Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I really enjoyed my book as it went into trying to find out what happened to Rey Rivera, while including information on the Belvedere hotel. It was a very interesting read, and I really wanted them to find out the truth about what happened.

I have yet to finish this book. It's a book to be savoured and I am really enjoying it. The background and history is just the icing on the top. Highly recommend.

Thank you to Netgalley, the authors and publishers for the opportunity to review this book in advance of publication in return for an honest review.

A very enjoyable read, the first of this author that I have read but I will definitely read of them now. Highly recommended

Many thanks to Netgalley and Mikita Brottman for the copy of this book. I agreed to give my unbiased opinion voluntarily.

Mikita Brottman is living at the Belvedere in New York when she becomes fascinated by the death of fellow resident, Rey Rivera. Rivera seemingly jumped to his death from the top of the building, falling through the roof of what used to be the buildings swimming pool and remaining undiscovered for days. Brottman finds herself at a loss to explain Rivera’s death and quickly becomes obsessed with it. Her search for the truth takes her on a journey which encompasses the history of the building and some of the other mysterious deaths which have taken place within it’s walls over the years.

Brottman’s writing style is quite understated and the book never tips over into sensationalism. There’s various bits of research and stories about the hotel and suicide dotted throughout the book which I found really interesting. The author is wary of upsetting Rivera’s widow and the two have a few face to face meetings over the years that Brottman is investigating Rey’s death. It’s a interesting journey into navigating the ins and outs of an investigation too. Brottman’s lack of an “in” with investigators often leaves her unable to get crucial paperwork and shows how labyrinthine the system can be to negotiate. There is no smoking gun, however, and by the end it’s apparent that the old Sherlock Holmes adage of when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth remains true. It’s a really interesting book and one that goes off the well beaten path of true crime into something more. A fascinating read.

I received a ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

This is a very strange book... Mikita Brottman lives at the Belvedere which used to be a grand hotel but is now apartments. She finds out about an unexplained death within the building, which could be murder or suicide or a tragic accident. She starts to investigate and along the way we get part memoir, part musing on memory and truth, part history of a grand building and overall a poetic and idiosyncratic book. It might be a bit like marmite but I personally really enjoyed the meandering nature as the book drifted all over the place - but I could understand how others might find that irritating. The story has many angles and many offshoots but it is never boring.

Recommended if you want a contemplation on life and death and all the weird bits in between...

I was given a free copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Thankyou to NetGalley, Canongate Books and the author, Mikita Brottman, for the opportunity to read a digital copy of An Unexplained Death in exchange for an honest, unbiased opinion.
I thought this book offered a really good, interesting read. I enjoyed it.
Well worth a read.

I am not sure why I picked An Unexplained Death up at the first place. I don’t read crime stories, or to be more specific, very rarely I read a crime story, let alone a true crime story. I read the first page and It sounded interesting. So, I decided to give it a try, and it didn’t disappoint.

Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst,writer and professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has an interest in true crime. She lives in old Belvedere Hotel in Mount Vernon, Baltimore,the building where the body of Rey Rivera, the “Missing” man in our story, found in 2006. His death was initially ruled a suicide.

Mikita Brottman had her doubts about the suicide version. Why a young, handsome man who was planning the future with his young wife-his soulmate according to their friends-would he decide just to kill himself? Something’ s not right. And so it began, a long and complex investigation into the life and death of Rey Rivera. An obsession that lasted ten years.

Soon you realise that the causes for this compulsive behaviour are deeper. Mikita Brottman is an unusual person, and she has another interesting story to say. Her own story. There seems to be a disparity when it comes to her feelings, between how she feels and how she actually is. She feels that she is invisible to other sand to the world. It took me a while – and some extra reading – to understand what that means, I, myself, am a quiet person but I don’t feel excluded or ignored, at least not always. Does this explain Brottman’s obsession with the death of Rivera? Is this a way of reaching out, to make her feel like she belongs and that she is worthy? I have no answers but reaching at the end of book, I had the feeling that this investigation was a long journey to reconnect with herself.

But An Unexplained Death is also a brief history of Belvedere hotel, a historic Beaux arts style building built in 1903. Or perhaps I should say, the hotel’s dark history, as Mikita Brottman delves into the history of the suicides that took place during the last century in Belvedere.

An Unexplained Death is a complex, unexpected and captivating book. It is not just a chronicle of a crime investigation; it is also a dark psychological drama, and a memoir of an interesting person fascinated with death.

The motive for a crime is always, Love, Drugs or Money

Mikita Brottman is a writer and a professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in downtown Baltimore. She also writes a forensic podcast and is a qualified psychoanalyst. All of this makes her an inquisitive woman.

When, while walking her bulldog, Oliver, she sees a poster appealing for information on missing person Rey Rivera. She is hooked and has no option but to follow her nose and try to solve the mystery.

This hits closer to home when Rivera’s body is found at the old Belvedere Hotel building in Baltimore. The Belvedere has a chequered past, never quite meeting its potential as a successful hotel. A series of scandals and unwise investments have meant that the building has now found a new life as apartments, one of which Brottman shares with Oliver and her partner David.

This true crime tale investigation absorbs Brottman for more than a decade of her life as she tries to untangle the threads of the victim’s life. She is taken into a dark world of intrigue and suspicion, and at times she fears for her life. Nonetheless, she is dogged and determined to solve the mystery.

I must admit to true crime not being my favourite genre; there seems something unhealthy in gaining entertainment from other’s misery. However, this is a masterly example, and the writing is compelling. Behind every detail, there is the Gothic presence of the Belvedere with its scandals and secrets.

If this is your genre, then you will love this book.

Pashtpaws

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

With all its trails and stories, built on what is purported to be a true event of the disappearance of a local man - whose body is found as if he'd jumped from the roof of a grand hotel, now fallen in repair and reputation - this is an engrossing read. We learn the entire context and speculation about maybe why people jump or are pushed - we delve back into his work place pressures and the company's pressures - friend's and just how we are all integrally related to everyone around us and to their history and the history of where we live. It's like when you are a kid, and you play with your address: street, town, state of region, country, continent, planet, universe - it all converges on that one moment - the disappearance and subsequent discovery of a dead body. Riveting despite its final inconclusiveness - really unique piece of work, hard to put down. My question to myself as i read was, why am i continuing to read? The familiar carefully articulated observations internally, resonated with me completely. Great read. Almost a pure read.

I found this an odd mixture of the compelling and the slightly dull, so I find it hard to give an overall view.

An Unexplained Death is the true story of Mikita Brottman’s quest, lasting over a decade, to find the story behind the death of Rey Rivera. Rivera was an ostensibly happy, successful man who fell to his death from the Belvedere building in Baltimore where Brottman lives. There seem to be a lot of mysterious cover-ups and possibly shady dealing in the background, so she is sceptical about the prevailing view that Rivera’s death was suicide.

Among the story of her investigations we get a lot of historical detail about the Belvedere (formerly a swish hotel) and its many suicides, suicide in general, Rey’s links with a company selling possibly dodgy financial advice, Brottman’s personal internal life and so on. It is by turns fascinating and slightly tedious, and her conclusions are a little unsatisfactory; they fit the physical evidence in a way that competing ideas do not, but don’t explain all the odd, shady background stuff which was the reason for her interest in the first place.

Brottman does write very well, which kept me reading. As a couple of examples, writing of hotels’ attitude to suicide she says; “...employees are instructed to be alert for guests who appear agitated and distraught, or for anyone lingering suspiciously in an elevated place. Such vigilance may appear altruistic, but human kindness is often simply a side effect of liability prevention.” Or of trying to find out more about Rey on-line, “I have now spent years of my life following Internet threads by angry speculators, investors, muckrakers, and “independent thinkers” of dubious sanity, a bizarre path of loosely connected breadcrumbs that has led me to the edge of nowhere and back again.” These readable, pithy comments made it well worth persevering, but I did find myself skimming occasionally.

An Unexplained Death is a curious mixture; I found that I wanted to read to the end but was rather glad when I go there so I could go on to something else. I have rounded 3.5 stars up to 4 because it is well written, but my recommendation comes with reservations.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

This book was super all over the place. Supposedly it's a sort of true crime book about a body that was discovered in Baltimore's Belvedere Hotel, which has actually long been condos and not a functioning hotel. The police ruled it a suicide, but the author of the book who lives at the Belvedere believed there was something more sinister going on and has spent years investigating what might have actually happened. She gets real conspiracy theory and nothing ever really comes of it other than a lot of crazy speculation. Throw in her randomly constantly switching topics in the middle of chapters to talk about her mental health or other murder cases or the history of the building and this book does not really know what it wants to be. As someone who lives in Baltimore I did find the parts about the history of the building to be interesting, but I would rather have just read a book about that without all the other nonsense this book was composed of.

The author is intrigued when she notices a Missing poster for a man who disappeared in Baltimore, and when his body is found in the Belvedere (the converted hotel where the author lives), she becomes involved in trying to find out what happened. The case is deemed a suicide but many are not convinced that Rey Rivera, a man seemingly with everything to live for, would take his own life.

The writing style is best described as meandering, as the book not only discusses this case but also the histories of previous unexplained deaths and suicides which took place at the Belvedere over the decades. I, personally, found the detours interesting but some people may not. This was definitely a strange case, and I'm not sure that I entirely agree with the author's conclusions. It leaves too many unanswered questions for my liking, but I guess we will never know exactly what happened.

Thanks to NetGalley and Canongate Books, for the opportunity to review an ARC.

At first I found this book fascinating. It is extremely knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects. Up to about halfway through I found the many digressions interesting and quirky. The problem was I had to keep reminding myself that this book was supposed to be about a suicide. Eventually the many tangents became intrusive, and I began to skip over them. This didn't affect the plot at all!
On the whole, a very well worthwhile book, but too meandering for me.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC

This is an interesting read. It is well written and has obviously been well researched. Mikita has obviously spent a long time trying to work out how Rey died. In many ways this is a sad story about the fragility of human life.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A wonderful find of a book, thoroughly enjoyable. Whilst keep returning to the central theme of the investigation into the unexplained death we meander down lots of loosely related other interesting stories of things connected with the hotel or procedures of police and other authorities in the case of a found body. A book you don't want to end and it leaves the family of the dead man and the reader wanting the book to continue. The curious mind and its wanderings and I could read lots more from this author, hearing her thoughts and progress into other investigations. One to recommend,. a delightful read from cover to cover. More please.

This book started off being quite interesting and I was quite excited to read it, but about half way through, it got a little bogged down with certain issues. The history of the hotel, other suicides and personal experience got in the way of a really good story - each on their own would have made a good book, but interwoven as it was, just couldn't keep my interested.

This book has an interesting premise: the suicide of man from the top of Belvedere hotel from the POV of a an occupant of that building after it's changed into apartments. However, for me, it failed to deliver. The narrative felt disjointed and mismatched, not sure on what it wanted to achieve or knowing how. The beginning was interesting however I struggled to maintain attention on it. Although finding some fact interesting, especially those about suicide, I do not think that the current format does this book's justice.

The recent boom in Netflix true crime documentary series has perhaps led to certain expectations for shock revelations and finger-pointing, even if in reality of such cases in The Staircase and Making of a Murderer can never answer the basic questions of the unexplained deaths at the heart of their true-life crime dramas. Anyone expecting a definitive answer in Mikita Brottman's investigation into the mysterious unexplained death of one man in her home town of Baltimore is going to be disappointed then, but just as those Netflix series throw a fascinating light on the American legal system and processes and reveal underlying social issues and prejudices, so too Brottman's An Unexplained Death likewise has other worthwhile avenues of interest to explore.

Not everything can be explained, particularly when it comes to the motivations and state of mind of a man who leaves home unexpectedly one evening in 2006 and doesn't come back. His body is found eight days later in the annexe to a tall building, apparently having crashed through the roof in a suicide jump. There are however no witnesses, no clues and only a strange note left by his computer that doesn't look like a suicide note, and there were no indications in the run-up to his death that Rey Rivera, a freelance video producer and budding filmmaker, was depressed, suffering from financial or marital problems, had any history of mental illness or reason why he might contemplate taking his own life.

The nature of Rivera's death is initially recorded as 'undetermined', but doubts about whether it was really as suicide or a homicide linger among family and friends and the case remains open, even if no one is officially investigating it any longer. There is in fact a curious reluctance from anyone involved in the investigation to speak about the case on-record or even off-record, as Rey's wife and friends find out, and even some warnings not to ask questions and watch your back are intriguingly offered when the writer Mikita Brottman starts to probe further into Rivera's background and his association with a certain secretive financial investment organisation.

Brottman's personal interest in the case is freely discussed, almost as much as the case itself. She lives in the apartment block of the historic former hotel, the Belvedere, the same tall building that Rey Rivera threw himself from, and Brottman even recorded in her diary hearing a loud crash the night of his fall. The author also admits to her own insecurities as an "invisible person", and her interest in the lure of crime and mystery, citing observations by Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and even the X-Files in relation to Rey Rivera's mysterious unexplained death. "All my life I've wanted to experience something like this, something inexplicable", she confesses.

Brottman however is methodical in her more conventional research and investigation - almost morbidly so in relation to suicide, its causes and statistics, the methods used across the world and specifically with regard to the macabre case studies associated with the Belvedere. As downright bizarre as some of those cases are, none of them are as strange as the case of Rey Rivera. Or at least not as far as Mikita Brottman is concerned. To the reader there's initially little that stands out in the Rivera case as suspicious, nothing that would lead you to believe that it was anything but just another suicide. Essentially, by the time you get to the end you don't really find out anything more than you knew at the start of An Unexplained Death. And perhaps that's what is strange about it.

There are however a number of intriguing avenues explored by Brottman along the way. Rivera's involvement with Agora, a dubious investment advice and tax avoidance company connected to William Rees-Mogg, raises some troubling questions, but since no one from there is willing to talk about Rey it's another dead-end that only adds to the mystery. Brottman fills the book out with her own personal responses and anecdotes, with research, theories and case studies that are tangential and sometimes seem to have little relevance. The lack of any real discoveries, revelations or conclusions then is inevitably disappointing but An Unexplained Death remains a fascinating read. Perhaps it's simply accepting the fact that we can never truly know what another person is going through and that there are some things we can never know that may be the real point here.

The Belvedere used to be a hotel but had been converted into flats. In one of these lives Mikita Brottmany and when the body of a man is found at the flats it becomes her mission to solve the case. However, the Belvedere has many dark secrets and after 10 years she is still trying to piece together how and why he died.