Zac Brettler is the central figure of the book, a charismatic 19-year-old whose mysterious death opens the narrative. Raised in a comfortable, intellectual Jewish family in London and the grandson of celebrated Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Zac is portrayed as bright but restless. His outlook shifted at Mill Hill, a private school where he was surrounded by the children of foreign oligarchs and developed an intense preoccupation with money and status, fueled by social media and films like The Wolf of Wall Street. Friends and teachers recall a warm, performative boy whose charm masked a growing sense that his own family’s accomplishments were not enough to keep pace with the wealth around him.

Zac came to believe that “[a]ll that really mattered in the world was money and power” (29), and that ambition led him to construct a fraudulent identity as “Zac Ismailov,” the son of a deceased Russian billionaire. The persona granted him access to a world of luxury and power but also drew him into contact with dangerous figures. Keefe presents Zac as a product of his environment, a teenager whose aspirations are shaped by a “city that was drunk on foreign lucre” and a culture that prizes extreme wealth regardless of its origins (23).

As the book progresses, Keefe peels back layer after layer of Zac’s secret life, revealing a young man living almost entirely in fiction. He maintained separate phones, fabricated email chains, forged documents, and conjured business deals that he pitched to grown men with decades of experience in finance and crime. He told some acquaintances he was Kazakh, others Russian, others Azerbaijani, calibrating each version of himself to his audience. He spent money he did not have on hotel suites, designer clothes, and gestures of generosity intended to substantiate his persona, leaving a trail of unpaid bills and bewildered creditors behind him.

What emerges is a portrait of a teenager who had become trapped inside his own performance. Zac’s lies metastasized faster than he could manage them, and by the final weeks of his life he was juggling competing fictions in front of people who had begun to compare notes. Keefe shows how the very qualities that made the con work—Zac’s quickness, his social intelligence, his eagerness to please—also made it impossible for him to step out of it. To confess would be to lose the men who had taken him seriously; to continue was to deepen his exposure to figures who expected a return on their interest in him.

Zac’s fabricated identity drew him into genuine danger. His attempts to maintain the fiction while navigating London’s criminal underworld led directly to his death. Keefe uses Zac’s life and death to examine identity, ambition, and the destructive pull of the stories people construct about themselves.

Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, Zac’s parents, drove the search for truth that structures the book. Matthew, a structured-finance professional with an analytical mind, and Rachelle, a freelance journalist with an artistic sensibility, represent a world of decency, modesty, and intellectualism that stands in stark contrast to the “bling, power, action-packed” (49) lifestyle their son pursued. Their family history, as children of Holocaust survivors, gives their determination to seek justice a particular weight.

After Zac’s death, they move from grieving parents to determined investigators, refusing to accept the official suicide narrative. They collect evidence, record conversations, and challenge authorities, pushing back against the apparent inertia of the Metropolitan Police. Their journey exposes the difficulties an ordinary family faces when confronting a system that seems unwilling to scrutinize powerful or dangerous figures.

Keefe anchors the narrative in their perspective, using their grief, persistence, and love for their son to carry the book’s moral momentum. Their fight for answers functions as a desperate effort to “parent their child now in a way that they had been unable to do when he was alive” and as Keefe’s vehicle for examining the culture of impunity that allows powerful wrongdoers to operate without consequences in London’s wealthier circles (315).

Verinder Sharma, known in criminal circles as “Indian Dave” or “the Little Fella,” was a seasoned gangster and the last person to see Zac alive. Sharma spent decades involved in violence, extortion, and narcotics trafficking while consistently avoiding significant prison time. After being introduced to Zac through Akbar, he offers Zac a place to stay in his luxury apartment at Riverwalk, an arrangement that initially appears generous.

Keefe reveals that Sharma saw Zac, presenting himself as an oligarch’s son, as a potential financial score. The relationship sours as Zac’s fiction becomes untenable, and the atmosphere in the apartment turns threatening on the night of Zac’s death. Sharma is described as the “top dog” in a world where violence is the operative currency and “a gangster who was worried about retirement and on the lookout for a final score” (317).

Keefe uses Sharma to put a face on the danger lurking beneath London’s surface of civility. Sharma’s ability to operate with impunity for decades, despite being a known and feared criminal, reinforces the book’s argument that the justice system repeatedly fails to hold well-connected wrongdoers accountable.

Akbar Shamji is the Cambridge-educated businessman who connected Zac to Verinder. As the son of the disgraced tycoon Abdul Shamji, Akbar is portrayed as perpetually ambitious but lacking substance, a con man who moves from venture to venture and leaves “a trail of defaulted mortgages, adverse judgments, court liens, and pissed-off business partners” in his wake (278). He befriended Zac after being introduced to him as “Zac Ismailov” and took on the role of mentor, apparently accepting the fiction of Zac’s Russian oligarch father.

Akbar introduced Zac to Sharma and participated in business dealings premised on Zac’s fabricated wealth. After Zac’s death, his evasive and contradictory statements to both the Brettlers and the police made him a central figure of suspicion. Keefe depicts him as simultaneously deceived by Zac and complicit in the consequences of the con.

Through Akbar, Keefe examines the blurred boundary between legitimate enterprise and criminal activity in contemporary London. His deflections and ultimate lack of accountability illustrate the wider pattern the book identifies: In London, relationships are transactional, and well-connected individuals routinely escape scrutiny.