An Unexplained Death
The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere
Mikita Brottman
“What could make a stable, gregarious, newly married man who had just made plans for the weekend suddenly jump off a building?”
Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
The unnerving true story of an unexplained death in Baltimore’s historic Belvedere building
Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
When the body of a missing man is discovered in the Belvedere, an apparent suicide, resident Mikita Brottman becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances of his death. The Belvedere used to be a hotel dating back to Baltimore’s Golden Age but is now converted into flats, and as Brottman investigates the perplexing case of the dead man, she soon becomes caught up in the strange and violent secrets of the Belvedere’s past. Her compulsions drive her to an investigation lasting over a decade.
Utterly absorbing and unnerving, An Unexplained Death will lead you down the dark and winding corridors of the Belvedere and into the deadly impulses and obsessions of the human heart.
“Set in a Gothic hotel worthy of Poe, this mesmerising book looks into all the dank corners of an obsession with a true crime case. Hypnotic, brutally honest and unputdownable”
Denise Mina
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“This is a learned, lucid, and finally heartbreaking account of urban obsession. It’s David Fincher’s film Zodiac crossed with accounts of Judge Crater’s disappearance crossed with Ms Brottman’s wild take on the unknowability of life and the necessity of staying obsessed. Ms Brottman is a groove - and so is her book”
James Ellroy
“An absolute page-turner. Her deceptively simple prose is both elegant and eloquent, and has the effect at times of making you feel as if you are the protagonist in a Raymond Chandler novel … Superb”
irish Times
”An Unexplained Death is something special. Brottman’s searing honesty and insight, and her smooth, sinewy prose, turn this into a rather profound meditation on life and death, and our attitudes to both. Highly recommended”
big Issue
“Mesmerising. A haunting meditation on the opacity of facts”
Claudia Rowe, Author Of The Spider And The Fly
Mikita Brottman
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
