I had never heard about Ray Rivera until I read this book. Fascinating and poignant, Mikita Brottman has done an immaculate job at researching Ray’s life prior to his death as well as after. Ray left home after his wife left for work and was never seen or heard from again until his lifeless body was found outside the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore. The findings of facts surrounding the case are very strange. How did Ray get to the hotel. His body was mangled yet his cell phone did not have even a scratch on it. The mystery behind his death still lurks today although the author did provide the reader with more details than what most websites offered up. I had to google his death after reading the book. I liked the way the author laid everything out for us and did so in a way that was very easy to follow and at a pace that kept the story flowing without having to provide flash backs or reiterate much of the past. I recommend this book to everyone who appreciates true mysteries.


Thank you to netgalley as well as the author/publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for my honest review.

An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere by Mikita Brottman is really more than just the story of Rey Rivera, it is also a bit of a history on the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland plus other random things the author decided to talk about. I haven't read too much true crime and I was really excited for this one, especially knowing Brottman actually lived in the hotel (at least that is what I gathered from the book). I thought she was an investigative journalist for some reason but when I looked her up it seems she is actually a psychologist with an interest in true crime. Which makes no difference to me, but I don't really know what happened with this book of hers.

I really liked the parts about the history of the hotel and other strange happenings there, but I didn't think there was enough attention to them or Rivera in the book. Brottman went off on a lot of unrelated tangents and I thought her writing was very choppy. I decided to listen to the audiobook, and I really liked her voice but found her narration to be choppy as well. So as much as it pains me to say this, I think I would go with reading the book and not the audio, but it wasn't awful so if you want to listen to it I'm sure you'd be fine.

Overall, I was a little disappointed in An Unexplained Death and wanted a lot more about Rivera and the hotel, and less about Brottman's life and other unrelated things she writes about. However, if you want to learn just an overview of the case and the Belvedere I would still recommend checking it out. It wasn't a bad book by any means, just not what I was hoping for.

Thank you to the publisher for my advance review copy via NetGalley. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

For me, this book was hard to keep up with. It seemed to be all over the place, Some parts of it was ok but just moved around too much. The premise of the story was good but, could have been better executed. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on my thoughts.

The story of Ray Rivera's death has raised many questions - ever since it was first reported that he was missing. He was not the type of man to just walk out and never return. While his wife was away on a business trip, he left the house in a rush, never to be seen again.

The case has taken several turns, no one really knowing where he was going or why. When his body turned up at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, even more questions were raised. How did he get there? Did he jump? Was he pushed? Why were his shoes found where they were, and his cell phone - it was not broken, nor did it look as though it had been through a fall. It simply looked like they were placed there, while Ray himself looked as though he had come from a great height.

The mystery surrounding his death remains, and this book goes through the case, his life, and what was going on before he died.

Loved this book! It was amazing! Definitely worth a read!

The story of Rey Rivera has recently been made known globally due to a revival in Unsolved Mysteries. Prior to this massive influx of attention, author Mikita Brottman painstakingly researches and documented the search for real answers in Rey Rivera’s case. In addition to Rivera’s death, Brottman also examines the fascinating history of the Belvedere, a hotel that could have a novel of its own. The author’s personality is also infused in portions of the novel, and the reader learns as much about the author as they do about the known circumstances of Rivera’s death. This is a rich and in-depth exploration of a mysterious death and how people react to that circumstance. I definitely recommend this, even just as a way to examine the language of how mysterious deaths are talked about.

Rey Rivera went missing in Baltimore. His body was found in the swimming pool area of the Belvedere (formerly a hotel, now a set of condos.)

The night Rivera went missing, author Mikita Brottman (also a literature professor) heard a loud crashing noise outside. Brottman is a curious personality (she attends random trials at a nearby courthouse, just for entertainment) with a slightly morbid bend of mind and a conviction that the world doesn't see her--that she is invisible.

This book is their story.

On the face of it (even on the cover), this book is a true crime exploration of how, and why Rey Rivera died. Throughout the book, Brottman presents the facts of Rivera's disappearance and death, and explores all of the possible reasons for it (suicide, accident, murder).

Woven throughout the book, though, is more than a true crime narrative. It is a history of hostelry, a meditation on suicide, a discussion of what gives us meaning, a commentary on our connections and how we understand them, an analysis of mental health, and more. It is all of these things, brought together in a deeply human light and presented at a level of writing that far exceeds the typical true crime genre. There is a tenderness here toward people, all people, and their plight. If you've ever seen the photograph of "The Most Beautiful Suicide," this is the literary equivalent of it--a crime story that is also art.

What's good: Clearly, I gobbled this up. The writing is beautiful. The way in which the author's overall narrative structure suddenly became apparent to me was its own moment of suspense and pay-off.

What's iffier: I thought the constant references to the author's invisibility were a bit irksome initially and could have been dialed back a bit. In hindsight, I can see the need to emphasize this, given the conclusions later in the book, but to be honest, part of me was saying, "Get a backbone and be rude, lady."

Again in the beginning, the realization that Brottman was likely a witness to the death of Rey Rivera--and that the police failed to follow up on this--needed a bit more attention.

Some of the writing, while beautiful, was repetitive. There are two sections, for example, in which Brottman lists the random, often morbid, discoveries she finds on her walking adventures. The structure was memorable enough to me that what was a beautiful structure the first time this came around was a rock in my shoe the next, making me wonder why the editor let this go. (I do need to go back and reflect more on whether the repetition added anything to the text, but at first glance, I didn't see a reason for it other than the author's enjoyment of the structure.)

The author's style seems to float around a bit--if you're a reader who wants a straightforward, just the facts, approach to Rey Rivera's mysterious death, this may not be the book for you.

Overall, as you can tell, I really liked "An Unexplained Death."

(This book was provided to me as an ARC from Netgalley.)

The first third of the book, which focused on the history of the Belvedere, suicide trends, and the death of Rey Rivera was fascinating-- deeply researched and engaging. Once the focus on history and Rivera shifted to a more personal story about the author's fascination with the case, I found the book begin to drag. The most memoir-ish parts of the book felt scattered and fairly navel-gazing. I'm not anti-memoir-cum-nonfiction (in fact, I often love it!) but in this case, it made the book feel disjointed. I wish Brottman would have stuck with the story and her excellent research and not meandered so frequently down the many dark hallways of her own day-to-day.

I wanted to like this book but it just was too disjointed, too all over the map for me. Not sure if it needed better editing or better writing., I wound up not finishing it.

Mikita Brottman's An Unexplained Death is about the mysterious death of Rey Rivera at the Belvedere in Baltimore. The book had great potential with the mystery surrounding Mr. Rivera's sudden death. I wish the author had been more focused. She jumped from relevant topics to random things from her everyday life. She honed in as much on past suicides at the Belvedere as she did on the death of Rey Rivera. I would have preferred a more centralized story.

This book was fascinating. The author unveils a dark mystery surrounding the unexpected death of a young entrepreneur at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, while weaving it with other stories of people dying there under strange circumstances throughout the decades.
What makes the book even more interesting, is that Brottman includes aspects of her own personal life, such as her fixations with the bizarre and how sometimes she feels that her perceived "invisibility" helps her more than harms her.
A book not to be missed, well written and thoroughly researched, An Unexplained Death is perfect for those who have often wondered what happens behind closed doors.

An Unexplained Death is about a mysterious death of a man in the author's apartment building. This book was well-written and fairly researched, though I would have liked more information regarding why the author decided to delve so deeply into this stranger's story.

"An Unexplained Death is an obsessive investigation into a mysterious death at the Belvedere - a once-grand hotel - and a poignant, gripping meditation on suicide and voyeurism.

“The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word ‘Missing,’ printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux.”

Most people would keep walking. Maybe they’d pay a bit closer attention to the local news that evening. Mikita Brottman spent ten years sifting through the details of the missing man’s life and disappearance, and his purported suicide by jumping from the roof of her own apartment building, the Belvedere.

As Brottman delves into the murky circumstances surrounding Rey Rivera’s death - which begins to look more and more like a murder - she contemplates the nature of and motives behind suicide, and uncovers a haunting pattern of guests at the Belvedere, when it was still a historic hotel, taking their own lives on the premises. Finally, she fearlessly takes us to the edge of her own morbid curiosity and asks us to consider our own darker impulses and obsessions."

Your latest true crime obsession.

This book was a disaster. Although I found the story about Rey’s death compelling the other parts of the book were disjointed and uninteresting. It was like the author wanted to write about Rey but there just wasn’t enough there. And I found her conclusion on what happened to Rey to be shockingly irresponsible and based on nothing more than supposition. I hated when she brought the book around so much to her and feeling invisible, her talking about rats being killed and her talking about the history of suicides at the Belvedere. It just didn’t flow together. Huge disappointment because she is a good writer.

An untimely death that can not be determined as murder, suicide, or accident is entered as an 'unexplained' death on the death certificate. Many families are left without closure with this determination but often there is a lack of avenues of exploration to carry the investigation to an absolute cause of death.

An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere is an excellent study on suicide in general and the still mysterious death of Rey Rivera, a 32 year old athletic newlywed in Baltimore in 2006. Toss in an interesting history of the Belvedere Hotel built in 1906 and you have a book that is difficult to set aside come supper time. There was a time or two that I felt a bit uncomfortable finding fascinating the suicide and murder statistics and details presented by Mikita Brottman, but I got over it rather quickly. I did stop reading them aloud to my husband about half way through as he was looking at me with an odd expression. Fear? Intense interest? after 43 year together, best not to know absolutely.

Mikita Brottman has an excellent handle on keeping us entertained. The sheer weight of facts on Baltimore crime, the history of the Belvedere as it was transformed through its' long history, and the details of her search for information from persons present during the 2006 timeline of this disappearance at the Belvedere, the Baltimore Police Homicide Division and Records Department, and the family of Rey Rivera could be overwhelming. I found them overwhelmingly interesting. She is an author I will follow.

I received a free electronic copy of this true detailing of the death of Rey Rivera from Netgalley, Mikita Brottman, and the Henry Holt & Company publishers in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

This is the story of missing man Rey Rivera, a very tall guy who’d been supposed to finish work on putting together a video project for his boss. He never even showed up for the rented production booth space to finalize it that he’d paid for. The author became interested when some missing posters were spotted around the area in New York, first a few and then many. They described Rivera and gave information on who to contact. Then in the story, the Belvedere is explored, a former gem of a hotel that has been turned into modern day apartments or condos of sorts for private residents, and some of the larger spaces were leased out to businesses too. Rivera’s body is eventually discovered at the Belvedere, nearly a week after he went missing, a supposed suicide by jumping off the roof. He apparently crashed through what used to be the roof of the pool before but had been turned into business space that had recently become vacated. Author Mikita Brottman happened to live in the Belvedere and spent nearly ten years on this project, apparently quite driven by the story and unsatisfied by the “undetermined” cause of death the coroner gave. She knew that the police wouldn’t investigate it because of that, and felt the man deserved more of an answer and that there was a good chance that he may have been murdered.

An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley, author Mikita Brottman, and the publisher for my fair review.

Henry Holt & Company 288 pages
Pub: date: Nov. 6th, 2018

The Author--
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 is also a certified psychoanalyst and runs a true crime podcast called Forensic Transmissions. She lives in the old Belvedere Hotel in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, with her partner, David, and French bulldog, Oliver. @MikitaBrottman | mikitabrottman.com

My BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog200.wordpress.com/981

This book was not what I expected. That isn’t a bad thing at all. I had done in expecting scandal and intrigue, and found introspection and analysis (which probably says a lot about me). An Unexplained Death reminds me strongly of Claudia Rowe’s The Spider and the Fly, which was a true-crime book that focused more on the impact of the crime and the killer on the author’s life.

The book deals with the mysterious death of Rey Rivera, who plunged from the roof of the Belvedere in Baltimore in 2006. Brottman, who lived (still lives) in the building, found herself intrigued, then obsessed by the circumstances of Rivera’s death. Add that to the history of the Belvedere itself, which seems to attract suicidal people, and there is a lot to dig into here.

Yet, the book is less about Rivera than about the author’s, and our own, fascination with death and self-destruction. Brottman speaks multiple times of her (unconscious and semi-unwanted) ability to be completely forgettable. She walks through her own story as some sort of ghost, peripheral and ephemeral to those around her. Whether the feeling of invisibleness contributes to her fascination with death and suicide isn’t stated.

Though the tone of the book was unexpected, I found myself swiftly drawn into Brottman’s tale. At times a stark history, at others almost a stream-of-concious musing, I admire Brottman’s ability to look into her dark fascinations and wring a moving story from them. After all, it is part of the human condition to want to gaze into that abyss. Few of us, however, are willing to admit how much we enjoy its pull.

An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I stopped reading this book about 20% in. It reads like a statistical report of suicides. The author also bogged down the story with her own personal feelings which didn’t fit with the narrative. This could have been an interesting story of it had a clearer vision and less statistics.

Very interesting book. I always enjoy reading books about unique items and this one did not disappoint. I highly recommend it.

This book has a confusing and morbid beginning. It starts off by saying people go to hotels to commit suicide. Then the book describes how the hotels clean up after the bodies are found. Furthermore, the author's puts in some personal information that has no relevance to the main point of the book. She describes how she always felt invisible. There seems to be no purpose in providing the reader with this information. I was almost halfway through the book when I realized that Mikita was a woman not a man; the author refers to her "partner" a lot; for much of the book I thought the author and her partner were two gay men in a relationship.

Once the book focuses on the "unexplained" death, it becomes more interesting. The author succeeds in making the person who died seem real and one feels for the victim and his family. The author comes up with a believable theory of what might have happened. Also, she describes some of the suicides that have happened in the Belvedere when it was a hotel. These suicides seem less morbid then the suicides described in the beginning of the book. Some of these suicides have a historical interest. Treatment for depression has improved and the stigma around suicides has been reduced over the years.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am not a big fan of true crime, but this was the exception. The author goes into great details about a death at the building where she lives. The building was once a hotel, dorm, and apartments/condos over the years and the author goes over the history of unpleasant things that have happened in the building. The focus however is on Rey Rivera, a 32 year old man who went missing in Baltimore in 2006. The circumstances surrounding his death are quite mysterious. Give this one a go, you won't be disappointed!