Viewed from certain perspectives—the perspective of history, the perspective of the roughly one quarter of the world that was once colonized by Britain—London is a metropolis built on crime. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most beautiful and culturally vital cities in the world, but the grandeur of its architecture, the splendor of its museums and galleries and cultural institutions, was purchased with the proceeds of centuries of thievery and murder. As someone whose own country, Ireland, was the first of those plundered by and ruled from London, I find it impossible to encounter Walter Benjamin’s famous assertion that “there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism” without seeing its ultimate proof in the empire’s former capital.
The American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who himself has roots in County Donegal—and whose most celebrated book, Say Nothing (2019), is concerned with the Troubles in Northern Ireland—is highly attuned to this aspect of the city. About three quarters of the way through his new book, London Falling, he pauses to reflect:
London is such a beautiful place that it can be easy, as you stroll around the city, to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder. London is the capital of pristine facades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is a literal whitewash.
The book portrays the city as a liminal metropolis where the line demarcating business and crime has been worn faint by heavy footfall from both directions. At its center is the story of a boy named Zac Brettler, who in November 2019, at the age of nineteen, plunged to his death from a balcony on the fifth floor of an upscale apartment complex a few minutes’ walk along the Thames from Tate Britain. The building itself, named Riverwalk, is a sort of synecdoche for the parts of the city with which Keefe is primarily concerned: expensive, shallowly glamorous, substantially owned by foreign-based speculators, and, as a result, strangely empty. (This hollowing out of London by foreign money, by Russian oligarchs and Saudi tycoons and so forth, is an ironic coda to the city’s colonial history.) There is, as he points out in the book’s opening pages, “a statistical correlation between the value of a property and the likelihood that it will be occupied: the higher the price, the greater the chance it is empty.”
Zac Brettler did not own an apartment in Riverwalk, and neither did his family. How he came to be staying there off and on, and how he fell to his death from one of its balconies, is a major narrative strand of Keefe’s book. The Brettlers, when we encounter them in the early pages, are a family of four, well known among London’s comparatively small and intimate Jewish community. (Zac’s maternal grandfather, Hugo Gryn, who survived the Holocaust, was a Reform rabbi as well as a prominent radio broadcaster.) They are well off: Zac’s father, Matthew, works in finance, and his mother, Rachelle, is a freelance journalist, a frequent contributor to How to Spend It, the Financial Times’ luxury lifestyle magazine supplement. They live in an apartment in Maida Vale, an affluent Central London neighborhood. The Brettlers are middle-class in the British sense of that term: university-educated, financially comfortable, but stolidly disinclined toward conspicuous consumption. Whether despite this background or because of it, young Zac becomes preoccupied with the outward signs of extreme wealth, luxury cars especially, in a manner somewhat precocious but not entirely remarkable for a teenage boy.
When Zac fails to get into the same public school as his older brother, Joe, he is sent instead to Mill Hill, an expensive but less established public school on the northern outskirts of the city. (A public school is, in the hermetic British idiom, a private and fee-paying institution.) And it’s here that things begin, in a small but significant way, to go awry. As the father of a boy who is closing in fast on his early teens, I read London Falling with a pained attention to its portrayal of this treacherous path between childhood and young adulthood, of how relatively routine decisions, such as a boy’s high school, can have profound and sometimes irreversible ramifications.
Mill Hill is filled, we learn, with the children of oligarchs, and awash with the culture and trappings of new London money. When, at fifteen, Zac starts boarding there, his parents see less of him and begin to notice a change. He becomes increasingly preoccupied with a sort of influencer vision of wealth and success: super-cars, fashion models, high-yield investments, fast and disposable money. He spends a great deal of time on Instagram. “At night,” Keefe writes,
he would lie in the darkness of his bedroom, his face aglow in the reflected light of his iPhone, and any momentary impulse he had, as expressed by his index finger on a touchscreen, could give rise to a kind of digital undertow, pulling him deeper into his own preoccupations.
He watches The Wolf of Wall Street with an avidity that suggests he might be numbed to its satirical sting, and he is especially enamored of War Dogs, a 2016 crime caper about a couple of twentysomething fraudsters who make a fortune in the international arms trade. At one point the Brettlers get a call from a concerned school administrator, informing them that their son has just left the campus in a chauffeured limousine; when he gets home and is pressed by his parents, he admits that he arranged and paid for the car himself.
After his death, they learn that Zac had been passing himself off as Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian billionaire, and attempting to use that identity, and the elaborate stories he spun out of it, to gain entry to a crepuscular world of dodgy real estate deals and glamorous clubs. One of the more moving aspects of the book is the way such acts of youthful imposture, in particular Zac’s grandiose attempts to portray himself as something other than a nice middle-class English boy, might, in a parallel reality, provide ripe material for a kind of broad social comedy. The Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs are both, after all, in their amoral ways, knockabout entertainments based on true stories about brash young interlopers who make a killing in high-stakes and legally dubious businesses.
Zac is described at one point as a Walter Mitty character; his invented identity seems to have been a sort of ad hoc confection of found cultural objects, of Instagram desires and Hollywood dreams. We learn from one of Zac’s friends that he once showed up to soccer practice with his torso covered with Cyrillic tattoos similar to those displayed on Viggo Mortensen’s chest in the 2007 Russian gangster thriller Eastern Promises. The following week the tattoos, bought online as part of a “Russian Prison Set,” are nowhere to be seen.
When Andrei Lejonvarn, a former school friend and tennis doubles partner, tells Keefe of Zac’s lies about his father being an arms dealer, we witness a bizarre collision of Zac’s fantasy life with the staid middle-class world he actually inhabits. On one occasion Matthew had agreed to drive the two boys to a tennis tournament. Zac had previously claimed that the family drove a pair of Range Rovers; he told Lejonvarn that both these luxury vehicles happened to be in the shop for repairs, and in the meantime his father had been given some crappy courtesy car to get around in. He wasn’t happy about it, Zac told him, and so under no circumstances should he ask about the Range Rovers, because his father would be liable to “freak out.” “When Matthew arrived, in his Mazda,” Keefe writes,
Andrei said nothing about the Range Rovers. But as they drove to the tournament, he experienced some confusion. On the basis of what Zac had said about his father, Andrei had been expecting someone a bit scary, or at least tough: a hardcore international gun smuggler. But instead, here was bespectacled, considerate Matthew, full of gently inquisitive questions about tennis and school. “He’s, you know, a nice guy,” Andrei said later, adding, “You could smell the bullshit.”
The book is scattered with such moments, which bear the faint trace of a more comic tale that was never to be; these details are poignant in their suggestion that if Zac could have outgrown this version of himself, he might have scrubbed away his fraudulent identity as easily and definitively as those fake gangster tattoos. Keefe is attuned to the ways this story, like all stories, is largely determined by chance.
Zac’s somewhat hapless self-invention as a wealthy young Russian eager to make deals leads him into an association with two much older men. One of them, Akbar Shamji, was a playboy entrepreneur in his forties. Zac’s parents learned of his impostures only after his death, but they were aware, before that, of his connection with Shamji. Their teenage son spending so much time with a middle-aged, seemingly high-flying businessman did strike them as strange, but they were willing to believe that he might be providing Zac’s wayward ambitions with some focus. (Zac told them that he and Shamji planned to set up a business together, selling a line of CBD-infused skin-care products.) They first met him in person in the brief interlude between Zac’s disappearance and the discovery of his body, when Shamji appeared to be as determined as they were to find him. We see him initially through their eyes—a handsome, refined, and even sweet-seeming man, who nonetheless reveals to them a very different version of their son than the one they thought they knew.
It is from Shamji that they learn that Zac had been lying about his identity. He was introduced to Shamji by a man named Mark Foley, a property manager loosely connected with Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and then owner of Chelsea Football Club. Foley had been taken in by Zac’s bluffing and had casually agreed to help him out. As far as Shamji was aware, Zac’s Russian oligarch father was dead, his estranged mother living in Dubai. Because of a dispute with his mother, Zac claimed, he was prevented from living in any of the family’s many luxury properties in London, and was therefore, despite his vast personal wealth, temporarily homeless.
Shamji introduced Zac to Verinder Sharma, a semiretired businessman living alone in a large apartment in Riverwalk, who agreed to take the boy in until he was able to get his own place. Among the many strange and disorienting things the Brettlers learn from Shamji and Sharma is that Zac had confessed to them, shortly before he disappeared, that he was secretly a heroin addict. This they find impossible to believe.
As byzantine as all of this may sound, it is in fact only the first tier of the story’s densely layered deceptions. Keefe proceeds by peeling back one layer after another. Shamji is, in reality, not far from Zac’s fictional version of himself. He is a product of significant wealth; his father was a Ugandan Indian businessman who came to London in the 1970s after Idi Amin expelled the country’s Asians, and who built up—through, it turns out, distinctly shady practices—an extensive business empire in Thatcher-era Britain. Shamji, like his father before him, is a kind of professional opportunist whose career is strewn with a series of failed businesses and burned creditors and business partners.
Sharma is, we eventually learn, a more sinister figure: a serious criminal known in the London underworld as “Indian Dave,” with links to the drug trade. He is a prolific extortionist who has extracted large sums of money from many victims through frequently horrific acts of violence. In the Aughts he was implicated in the murder of an associate, a nightclub owner named Dave “Muscles” King. The more the Brettlers learn about Shamji and Sharma—through the police, and through their own inquiries—the more convinced they become that these men are responsible for their son’s death. The effort to find out how this came about, and to prove it, forms the central thread of Keefe’s book.
It gradually emerges that these men viewed Zac as an opportunity for a shakedown; when his imposture, and his lack of spectacular wealth, becomes clear, Sharma is strongly disinclined to let him get away with it. Keefe’s portrayal of this man, “Indian Dave,” is often disturbingly detailed. He relates, for instance, an incident in which Sharma mercilessly beats an extortion victim in the backseat of a car. “An abiding personality trait of Indian Dave’s,” he writes,
was that he could find a way to feel sorry for himself in almost any situation. Now, even as he kept pummeling Hammond in the back seat, he lamented that he was not able to spend more time with his children, blaming Hammond for keeping him from them. As if in recompense, he unstrapped the expensive watch on Hammond’s wrist.
By this point in the book, we know enough about this man’s backstory, his history of extortion and torture and violent crime, to understand why Zac might have been out on that balcony in the first place. “Zac didn’t jump off the balcony to die,” his parents come to believe, “but to live.”
I am hesitating here to use the word “plot,” because it feels, in the circumstances, somehow unseemly. We are talking, after all, about a real tragedy, involving real people whose pain at the loss of their son scarcely bears imagining. There is no getting around the uncomfortable fact of Keefe’s having shaped this material into an infernally gripping narrative. And here, in writing about this book, a further difficulty arises: I find myself somewhat sheepish about revealing crucial moments in the story. The desire not to diminish the narrative pleasure a reader might derive from a brilliantly crafted book about the violent death of a teenage boy seems to me morally questionable. Perhaps it would be letting myself off too lightly here to blame the genre itself—a genre of which I am not just a critic but also, in the case of my own most recent book, a practitioner. (The reader may have noticed that I am just as reluctant to use the term “true crime” as the term “plot.”) Although Keefe doesn’t address these difficult questions head on, he comes about as close as possible to resolving them within the text itself, which for all its formal satisfactions is scrupulously humane in its handling of the Brettlers and their grief.
Around halfway through London Falling, he touches on the differing ways Matthew and Rachelle process that grief. Matthew, according to a family friend, “appeared to be developing a prosecutorial determination to understand the mechanics of his son’s plunge from Riverwalk and to figure out who precisely was responsible.” Rachelle, for her part, “found less comfort in logical inquiry and instead kept coming back to what her son might have been thinking and feeling in the final moments of his life. Was he in pain? Did he know that he was going to die?”
The first time I read the book I was so caught up in the dense intrigue and narrative propulsion of its story that I encountered this moment only, as it were, at the surface level of plot; I read it, that is, as an economical sketch of a couple both united and separated by the depth of their pain. But when I read it again, attending more carefully to the book’s submerged logic, it seemed to me to reflect, in an almost uncanny manner, Keefe’s own divergent imperatives—his opportunities and obligations—as the teller of Zac’s story. His approach is a marriage of the prosecutorial and the emotional. Some of the book’s most powerful writing is about the various ways the Brettlers were failed by the British justice system, and in particular the London Metropolitan Police, which seems content to chalk up Zac’s death to suicide. The book’s portrayal of the Met—gutted by budget cuts, institutionally timid, and rarely inclined to pursue difficult avenues of inquiry—is relentlessly damning. “A recent assessment by the police inspectorate,” we learn at one point, “found that the Met was failing in almost all work areas and that one category in which it was particularly ineffective was ‘investigating crime.’”
The grief suffered by the Brettlers is compounded by the Met’s apparent lack of interest in properly investigating their son’s death as a murder. Keefe suggests, convincingly, that one reason the police may not have pursued the case harder was that the Brettlers decided not to go to the tabloids. “Had they chosen otherwise and given press interviews,” he writes,
the London tabloids, which are famously insatiable when it comes to the mysterious deaths of young white people, might have put more pressure on Scotland Yard. Instead, there had not been a single mention of Zac’s death in the papers, which made it easier for the police to handle the case with such lassitude, then abandon it in the manner that they had.
The longer it drags on, the more painful and absurd the Brettlers’ situation becomes. When Sharma is found dead in his apartment—surely a sign that the police should redouble their efforts on Zac’s case—they decide that Sharma died by either suicide or a drug overdose, and whatever small chance might remain of their continuing to pursue the investigation of Zac’s death is obliterated. The Crown Prosecution Service decides not to prosecute Akbar Shamji, despite his having lied to investigating detectives.
A formal coroner’s inquest into the case does follow, and though it lacks the power to assign criminal liability, the Brettlers hope it will provide some legal clarity on the circumstances that led Zac to the balcony. The hearing quickly descends into farce. Shamji appears not in person but on a video monitor. After his desultory cross-examination concludes he continues to observe the hearing with his webcam turned off, and a truly ludicrous scene follows. At some point Shamji accidentally enables his camera, revealing to the entire courtroom the bathroom in which he is taking a shower. There is, as Keefe points out,
a metaphor in the notion that, even as the Brettlers attended their son’s inquest, roiled by emotion and listening anxiously to each piece of evidence, Akbar felt so unimplicated in the whole spectacle that he carried his device into the bathroom so that he could let the hearing run while he bathed.
Here, as so often in this book, the reader is made aware of how vulnerable the Brettlers—and, by implication, all of us—are to the cruel absurdity of the world. As a parent, it would be hard to read London Falling without reckoning with the sheer force of contingency that having a child brings into one’s life. As I made my way through the book, a loose moral diagram of the story began to take shape in my mind. First come the Brettlers: a moral and law-abiding upper-middle-class couple. Then comes their youngest child, Zac, who, partly because of the signals he absorbs from the culture, becomes obsessed with wealth and glamour. Zac falls into the orbit of Akbar Shamji, who is in many ways the exact sort of moneyed playboy he aspires to be. And through the machinations of this slippery and untrustworthy character, Zac is delivered into the hands of Verinder Sharma, a truly dangerous and wicked man. This descent, by steady degrees, into the roiling violence that lies beneath the city’s polished surfaces forms the narrative logic of the book.
It might seem, at first glance, that Keefe is working on a smaller scale than he was with the more sweepingly sociopolitical material of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain (2021), his book about the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic. It’s easy to imagine certain readers, having read his 2024 New Yorker article about Zac Brettler’s death, wondering whether the story warranted book-length expansion. But Keefe fills out the details of Zac’s life, and the lives with which it intersected, in a way that amounts to something much larger and more profound than a bulked-out magazine piece. In its deft depictions of multiple layers of London life—a middle-class Jewish family, a wealthy schemer of Ugandan Indian heritage, a gangland thug, a declawed and dispirited police force—the book reads like a nonfiction social novel, capturing something vital about a city that, for all its cultural energy and beauty, can feel as though it has ice in its veins.
Keefe never loses sight of the fact that Zac, beneath all the compulsive lying and dumb bravado, was just a kid in the messy process of figuring out who he was. It’s possible that, had he lived, he’d have turned out to be a swindler like Shamji. But it’s equally possible—in fact, given the decency and kindness of his parents, entirely likely—that he would have reached some kind of mature accommodation with his Walter Mitty tendencies. (Water Mitty himself, after all, in James Thurber’s story, lives a perfectly functional bourgeois existence, which is of course the whole point of Walter Mitty.)
Toward the end of the book the Met gives Matthew and Rachelle access to the browser history on their son’s iPad. Some of the search terms, unsurprisingly for a young man with his wayward interests, are dark—queries related to drug smuggling and gangs and so on. But the majority are far more mundane, and reveal the extent to which Zac, in the idle and open-ended way of nineteen-year-old boys, was thinking about his future: “football manager jobs”; “formula one jobs”; “sports jobs london”; “betting companies jobs uk intern”; “easiest sport to become pro”; “how to become a pro dart player.” Reading this list is uncomfortable; it feels almost too close to perusing the private thoughts and yearnings of a lost young man. But it is also among the most affecting and profound moments in the book, because in these scattered and haphazard queries can be glimpsed the unrealized possibilities of a cruelly foreshortened life.
English (US) · 