London Off the Beaten Path

Patrick Radden Keefe turns his significant investigative powers to the death of a con artist in his sixth book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth. What begins as an inquiry into a 19-year-old man’s possible murder quickly evolves into what Keefe is best known for: a bedrock-deep exhumation of some bad people’s biggest secrets.

With his previous books and as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Keefe has earned a reputation as the best reporter of criminal undergrounds and corporate skullduggery. He approaches shady people with an open mind, and his willingness to expose their secrets puts him right in the thick of it. This time around, rather than drill down into a core truth, Keefe spirals out into a widening gyre of lies, dirty money, and “the malign power of the metropolis.” One young man’s death opens the door to a world of London gangsters, Russian oligarchs, and the feckless British judicial system that allows them to get away with murder.

Keefe first learned about Zac Brettler while on set for the limited series based on Say Nothing, his bestselling investigation into a murder during Northern Ireland’s Troubles. During that show’s production in 2023, Keefe met a friend of the director who shared the plight of Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, a London couple whose son’s mysterious death had revealed a complicated scaffolding of lies.

During the early morning hours of November 29, 2019, an exterior building camera caught sight of Zac leaping from a luxury apartment balcony into the Thames below. His body was found the next morning, and in short order, the Metropolitan Police called it a suicide. But the more Zac’s parents tried to understand what had happened, the more they realized that they knew very little about their son. While away at boarding school, Zac had developed an obsession with money — and in particular with Russian oligarchs, a group of men who stole huge fortunes during the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of these men were enticed to the UK through a visa program designed to attract foreign money, in which investing millions of pounds into the economy could effectively buy legal resident status.

Inspired by displays of Russian wealth, Zac had adopted an alter ego as the son of an oligarch. By attending the types of clubs where he might run into people looking for a naive source of wealth, he formed close bonds with two dangerous individuals: a fraudulent entrepreneur named Akbar Shamji, and a violent gangster named Verinder Sharma, also known as Indian Dave. Zac told them he had a massive fortune and a heroin addiction. He was with Shamji and Sharma on the night of his death.

Figuring out who Zac had become before he died clearly wasn’t easy, but fortunately, from the moment he went missing, his parents documented every step of their search for the truth, often by recording their conversations. Zac’s father drafted timelines and kept meticulous notes, and these files led to an “unusually reliable, high-fidelity record” from which Keefe could build his investigation.

The author shows a lot of sympathy for the young man — who was a “swaggering, tormented fabulist,” Keefe writes — but he’s also realistic about Zac’s mistakes. To reconstruct Zac’s narrative, Keefe pulls in context from all directions and goes back generations, with especially fascinating stories about Zac’s grandfathers, both of whom were Holocaust survivors. The book takes on the beats of a classic family drama alongside the elements of a true crime investigation, with notable attention paid to the Brettlers’ grief in the years after their son’s death.

The details of London Falling spread out like a slow-motion lightning strike, with pieces snaking off in all directions, while Keefe faithfully tracks its primary path to the ground. As he follows the dirty money to its furthest extremes, he maintains a tight scope on his subject: the teenager who lionized some of the most evil people on the planet, wanted to become one of them, pretended he was equal to them, and then died. Any of the figures here could’ve been one of the “rebels and crooks” of Keefe’s essay collection, Rogues. Zac, Indian Dave, Shamji — they’re all bad. The city’s bad, the river’s bad, the cops are bad, but Keefe writes about all his subjects with a keen sense of understanding about why people make the choices they do and how permeable the line to illicit behavior truly is.