Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Rogues; Say Nothing) transforms family tragedy into a meticulously researched propulsive thriller in London Falling. Born in 2000, Zac Brettler was the younger son of well-to-do Rachelle and Matthew Brettler. "Zac appeared to savor 'the adrenaline of a fast life,' " brandishing wads of cash, accessing exclusive venues. On November 29, 2019, at 2:23 a.m., an MI6 camera caught a young man jumping into the Thames from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, one of London's poshest addresses. The corpse discovered a few days later was Zac.
The police claimed suicide. But death shockingly exposed Zac's utterly fabricated identity as Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch estranged from his family and awaiting a £200 million inheritance. Zac spent his final night with "gangster" Verinder Sharma and bankrupt "charlatan" Akbar Shamji, who both managed to exude extreme wealth and high-power connections. Desperate to understand, Rachelle and Matthew invested tireless years fighting "the bizarre passivity of Scotland Yard," eventually hiring a private investigator and conducting their own inquiries.
In a feat of remarkable reportage, Keefe layers expansively diverse narratives--Holocaust survivors, "London's new identity as a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money," the Cipriani Five, Idi Amin, Margaret Thatcher, Muhammad Ali, even Zac's rabbi grandfather's own secret life--to create an irresistible web of mystery. Keefe's unerringly razor-sharp attention links these disparate elements of heedless ambition and otherworldly privilege that created a powerful vacuum of want in a tenacious teen desperate for access. With empathetic insight, Keefe deftly sifts through facts and fictions to distill Zac's young life, enthrallingly seeking the unknowable truth of his tragic death. --Terry Hong