Every now and then, a book comes along that catches some invisible, unspoken, unforeseeable wave that gathers momentum and crashes onto the beach of the public imagination. Suddenly, the book is bobbing about everywhere, being talked about by everyone, piled up high in bookstore windows. Think Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
Five years ago, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain was all over websites and talk shows with its blistering takedown of the Sackler family and their part in the OxyContin crisis.
Now Keefe has landed another masterpiece with London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.
The story is, on the face of it, a simple one. In 2019, a teenager fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the Thames. Was he drunk or high? Was it suicide, or was he pushed? Zac Brettler’s family was middle-class, fairly intellectual, and reasonably well-heeled. Distraught at their son’s mystifying death, they made a sickening discovery: Zac had been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.
This is the entry point into a story just made for Netflix, with deception, grotesque amounts of money, gangsters, knives, and murder. It’s also the story of a once-great city paralysed by greed and corruption. A much-loved son becomes the victim of the city’s excess and moral decay.
Like South Africa’s celebrated non-fiction narrator Jonny Steinberg, Keefe’s scalpel is sharp but meticulously wielded, and his reach is broad. He gently prises apart the layers of the story, thin as tissue, until he exposes the rancid heart of it.
Zac was a funny, ambitious young man, known for his tall stories. He was fascinated by wealth and power, and his favourite movie was The Wolf of Wall Street. Then he moved out of home and, unbeknownst to his parents, took on a different identity, posing as Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch. He even spoke in a Russian accent and claimed that he was due to inherit millions of pounds. Ever on the lookout for what they called “fatted calves”, two unsavoury men hurried him under their wing. One was the dodgy businessman Akbar Shamji, and the other a feared gangster, drug dealer, and debt collector known as “Indian Dave”.
In piecing together the story, Keefe drops us into the Uganda of Idi Amin, who threw out thousands of Indian families in the early 1970s, including that of Shamji, whose father had been a wealthy businessman and whom Shamji worshipped.
He also takes us back through Zac’s own lineage to his paternal grandfather, who in 1939 had left Germany for the UK on the last of the Kindertransports, and to his maternal grandfather, who had lost almost all his family at Auschwitz and who became a much-loved and respected rabbi in London. But he was also not everything he seemed to be. Keefe highlights that Zac’s mother found herself the daughter of one man who had lived a double life and the mother of another.
Appallingly, the story also reveals how badly the Brettlers were let down by the police. Both Shamji and Indian Dave were present at the apartment on the night Zac died, but police were unable to charge either of them. A later inquest showed up shoddy policing mistakes and oversights.
Keefe is a master of structure, pulling together seemingly disparate strands, and an exhaustive researcher. He drills down into transcripts of police interrogations, emails, letters, and security camera recordings and has hours of conversation with Rachelle and Matthew Brettler. He is, first and foremost, an investigative reporter who has worked for years at The New Yorker. A lawyer with two master’s degrees, he is mighty cool, his Instagram showing pictures of Dua Lipa and Sarah Jessica Parker with his books. But it’s clear he takes his work very seriously.
“I am a trespasser,” he tells The Times. “I think that that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to be doing. But there is a price of admission if you want to trespass into somebody else’s world and their history. You have to tell the story in a way that people will be forced to acknowledge you got it right.”
From the August issue of Wanted, 2026.
