London Falling by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. may just change your perspective on what you think you know about your children or country. You may even question the verb tense in the title: London “falling” and feel it should be “fallen.” The subtitle is also suggestive: “A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.” At the end, mystery and lack of transparency remain, though what Keefe does uncover about what happened to cause the real-life death of a 19-year-old boy in London in 2019 may likely cause YOU to reassess what you think about what you can ever know about the dark side of children or the magnitude of corruption and compliant politics where you live.
A prologue opens the book: It’s 2:23 a.m. on November 20, 2019. A figure is shown pacing a balcony, then plunging off the fifth-floor of a luxury apartment building. A camera across the river, belonging to MI 6, no less, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, captures the image and also shows that it was the sole figure on the balcony. What the camera does not show but what emerges in subsequent inquiries is that the figure may have been alone on the balcony, but had not been alone in the apartment.
The body turned up in the Thames (about 30 bodies a year do, notes Keefe). It was of 19 year-old Zac Brettler, although in the wider world outside his home, he passed himself off successfully as Zac Ismailov, a Russian-born son of an oligarch, about to inherit millions. That put him in league with older, savvy, but dangerous grifters with whom he established a personal and professional relationship. His shadow life was totally unknown to his parents, Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, a comfortable, upper middle-class couple well known in London’s tight knit Jewish community. Rachelle was the daughter of a prominent rabbi and Matthew is regarded for his sharp, analytical intelligence. The Brettlers have another son, Joe, who also had no knowledge of what his younger brother was up to, though for sure the family did see that in the last two years Zac had grown distant, secretive and even more obsessed with big money and what it could buy.
The Brettlers were, understandably, stunned by Zac’s death and after repetitive tries to get the police to do a thorough investigation, they concluded they were given a runaround. The police, in turn, said their inquiries were the best they could do. They needed hard evidence, persuasive details that Zac may have been murdered, arguments that would stand up in court. Time goes by and then, by chance one day, the Brettlers are introduced to the author as he was working on the set of a film being made from one of his books. He was intrigued by the Brettlers’ story and moved by their predicament. He wound up writing a piece about it for The New Yorker in February 2024, breaking the Brettlers’ hitherto preference for privacy.
Working with new contacts he manages to uncover telling connections Zach had with vicious international cartels.
London Falling chronicles a parent’s worst nightmare: what do we really know about what our kids are doing? And every citizen’s fear that institutions entrusted to do justice and prevent violence cannot or do not do so. What do we really know about our democracy where money corrupts and big money corrupts big time, as it seems to have done in England in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the influx of well connected, well heeled immigrant criminals? Of ghost mansions owned by untraceable corporations, or of off shore banking and the legion of murderers, drug kings, thieves who sustain them? It is Keefe’s dramatic, suspenseful, meticulously documented, often verbatim account of these two fearful themes that gives London Falling its fascinating drive and disturbing authenticity.
