The New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe is best known in his native land for Empire of Pain (2021), an exposé of the Sackler dynasty and the role of their drug company Purdue Pharma in the opioid crisis. On this side of the Atlantic he has also been widely saluted for Say Nothing (2018), a history of the conflict in Northern Ireland as epitomised by the murder of a Catholic mother of ten called Jean McConville. His specialism is scrupulous, character-­based, episodic reconstruction from which powerful wider moral themes emerge, and in his new book, London Falling, he has achieved the former without straining for the latter.

Following a chance conversation with a stranger in a London television studio in 2023, Radden Keefe picks up the unsolved mystery of a young man’s death and embarks on a quest to unravel it. The result is a masterclass of evidence-chasing, narrative clarity and authorial empathy. 

The young man in question was Zac Brettler, second son of caring middle-­class Jewish parents, Rachelle and Matthew, and grandson of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a Holocaust survivor celebrated for the homely wisdom he dispensed on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. Brought up in a comfortable mansion flat in ‘quietly prosperous’ Maida Vale, Zac was an athletic and sociable youngster, a pied piper to younger children in the neighbourhood and, according to his mother, always ‘at ease talking to adults’. 

But as a teenager at Mill Hill School in north London, Zac found himself among an intake of the sophisticated offspring of Russian oligarchs who had lately taken up residence in the capital – and began to develop an obsession with money and its trappings. Radden Keefe describes a personality change that gradually drew Zac into a life of fantasy and danger: London Falling is bookended by his death, aged just nineteen, in the early hours of a November morning in 2019, when he jumped from the fifth-floor balcony of a Thames-side apartment close to Vauxhall Bridge. 

The tragic plunge was captured by a security camera on the building opposite, which happened to be the headquarters of MI6. But this isn’t a spy novel; it is a true-life portrait of Zac as he pulls away from his family and invents a new persona for himself (with a Russian surname, Ismailov, although he barely knew a word of the Russian language) as the wealthy son of a dead oligarch. 

He also pretends to acquaintances in his chosen milieu that he lives in the opulent Knightsbridge apartment complex called One Hyde Park. To his parents he claims to be prospering by wheeling and dealing in real estate, commodities and cars. When he shows his father an online bank balance of £850,000, he adds another bold stroke: he has ‘got into the oil and gas business through a Nigerian contact and some Kazakhs he knew’. 

All of which must have sounded pretty unconvincing, if not incredible. But Rachelle and Matthew knew their son had a ‘penchant for embroidery in his stories’ and tolerated his increasingly disagreeable behaviour, although Rachelle at one stage arranged for him to see a psychiatrist. They allowed him ‘the freedom to move around London like an adult’ and did not object when he told them he was moving out to live in the Thames-side apartment, in a luxury development called Riverwalk. Rachelle was nevertheless increasingly worried about the company her son was keeping.

Zac had in fact fallen in with two malign characters, a con man called Akbar Shamji and a violent gangster called Verinder Sharma, known in the London underworld as ‘Indian Dave’. Sharma lived in the Riverwalk apartment and was the only other person there (although not on the balcony) at the moment of Zac’s death leap. Shamji came and went before and after, but never satisfactorily explained his role in the night’s drama. 

The nature of the business and personal relationship between the three of them is the central focus of Radden Keefe’s investigation. There seems to have been nothing sexual: the likeliest explanation (this is hardly a spoiler) is that the two older men actually believed that Zac had access to a fortune, tried to extract it from him and terrified him when they began to suspect he could not deliver. The failure of Metropolitan Police detectives to follow the same trail with proper thoroughness is both a sidelight to the story and a spur to the author – assisted by the parents’ meticulous recollection and record-keeping – to track down every last character witness and clue. 

London Falling is divided into four main parts, and such is the intensity of narrative pace in part one, ‘The Fall’, that a lengthy diversion into the history of Britain’s Ugandan Asian community and Shamji’s past business ventures at the beginning of part two feels at first like an unwelcome deviation. But it is Radden Keefe’s way of painting an authentic backdrop and he adds fascinating context later on: one of Sharma’s criminal connections was Micky McAvoy (who died in 2023), mastermind of the notorious £26 million Brink’s-Mat gold robbery in 1983.

If there are any faults in this impeccable (indeed unputdownable) investigative exercise, they are the tiny slips of an American author writing a British story that should have been picked up by a British editor: an MP is not elected for a ‘district’, for example, and no Londoner would think of calling Park Lane ‘a short street’. But the verbatim elements, largely drawn from transcripts and recordings, are wholly convincing and the overall result is a desperately sad family story, overlaid on a disturbing glimpse of London’s sinister, money-driven, exploitative underbelly.