Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Rogues; Say Nothing) transforms family tragedy into a meticulously researched propulsive thriller in London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. His prologue captures the metamorphosis of London, where in 1860 the River Thames was once the world's busiest port, with a violent crime-ridden waterfront; and where revitalization along the same riverbanks in the 1980s transformed the city into "a preferred destination for money and people who had it."
Born in 2000, Zac Brettler, the younger son of Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, attended high school with the children of these international elite; although his parents were well-to-do, "Zac appeared to savor 'the adrenaline of a fast life,' " brandishing wads of cash, accessing exclusive venues, driving someone else's Maserati. 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, and with whom Zac seemed to have had entrepreneurial aspirations. Both Sharma and Shamji spun fabulous stories of a son Rachelle and Matthew couldn't recognize at all. Desperate to understand, they sought to "decode the mystery of what had happened to him." They invested tireless years fighting "the bizarre passivity of Scotland Yard," eventually hiring a private investigator and conducting their own inquiries. In 2023, a "chance encounter" (a family friend had officiated Zac's bar mitzvah) led the Brettlers to Keefe and ignited this intense collaboration.
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, uninhibited risks, 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
Shelf Talker: Patrick Radden Keefe creates an utterly propulsive thriller from a family's tragic reality.