London Falling

In the early hours of November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera on the headquarters of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, captures a young man walking onto a fifth-floor balcony at Riverwalk, a luxury residential complex on the north bank of the Thames. He moves from one corner to the other, then jumps into the river. The young man is Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old Londoner whose death exposes a web of deception, criminal violence, and institutional failure in contemporary London.

Patrick Radden Keefe opens with a sweeping portrait of London's transformation from an industrial port into a financial capital, tracing the closure of the docks, the Big Bang deregulation of 1986, and the city's reinvention as a magnet for foreign money. Luxury developments sit conspicuously empty, their units registered through offshore trusts. It is against this backdrop that Zac Brettler is born in September 2000 to Matthew Brettler, a structured finance professional, and Rachelle Brettler, a freelance journalist. Both of Zac's grandfathers survived the Holocaust: Matthew's father, Benny, escaped Nazi Germany on the last Kindertransport in 1939, and Rachelle's father, Hugo Gryn, survived Auschwitz and became a beloved London rabbi and BBC broadcaster. For this family, creating new life carries the weight of answering unspeakable loss.

Zac grows up charismatic and quick-witted, with a formidable memory and a gift for conversation. As an adolescent, he is rejected twice from University College School (UCS), a selective private school his older brother, Joe, attends. The experience wounds him deeply. He enrolls instead at Mill Hill School, on London's northern outskirts, where he encounters the children of oligarchs from the former Soviet Union who flaunt enormous wealth. Zac is mesmerized. He watches The Wolf of Wall Street repeatedly, identifies with its amoral antiheroes, and tells a friend, "I want to be bigger." By seventeen, he is surly and secretive, wears suits to school, praises Vladimir Putin at family gatherings, and tells his cousin Adam Massey that democracy is overrated and all that matters is money and power.

Rachelle and Matthew struggle to parent a child pulling rapidly away. After Zac puts his hands around Rachelle's throat during an argument, she insists he see a psychiatrist, Dr. Roger Howells, who finds traits of "strong asocial narcissistic flavor" but no depression or psychosis. Zac attends one session and refuses to return. He transfers to Ashbourne College in Kensington and begins spending time with Akbar Shamji, a forty-seven-year-old businessman living in Mayfair with his wife, the fashion designer Daniela Karnuts. Through Akbar, Zac meets Verinder Sharma, whom he describes to his parents as a "rubber tycoon." In the summer of 2019, Zac moves temporarily into Sharma's apartment at Riverwalk and claims to have amassed £850,000. His parents occupy what Keefe describes as a "curious, liminal zone," unsure what to believe but afraid that pressing too hard will drive Zac further away.

When Zac vanishes on November 29, a stranger appears at the Brettlers' door asking for him, and a voice on the stranger's phone declares, "That can't be his mum. His mum's in Dubai." Days later, at a meeting at Le Méridien hotel, Akbar reveals the staggering truth: He and Verinder had known Zac not as Zac Brettler but as Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch. Mark Foley, a man connected to Chelsea Football Club, had introduced Zac to Akbar as a potential investor. Zac had fabricated a dead billionaire father and a £200 million inheritance. On Zac's final day, Akbar claims the boy confessed to a heroin addiction. The Brettlers do not believe this, viewing it as another fabrication, a cry for help.

Meanwhile, a body found on the foreshore beneath Riverwalk on the morning of November 29 goes unidentified for four days. Police had assumed the corpse washed in from elsewhere and never entered the building. It takes until December 3 for officers to visit Riverwalk, speak with Sharma, and connect the missing teenager with the unidentified body. CCTV footage reveals that after leaving Riverwalk at 1:25 a.m., Akbar returned at 2:23, the very minute Zac stepped onto the balcony. He entered the apartment, left twenty minutes later, then walked to the river wall and peered into the Thames at the exact spot where Zac had entered the water. When confronted, Akbar claims the visit was a random smoke break: "It's a nice bit of the river." Verinder refuses to answer questions, saying "no comment" nearly two hundred times.

Keefe traces the histories of both men. Akbar's father, Abdul Shamji, was a Ugandan Asian businessman expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 who rebuilt an empire in England on debt and political connections, cultivating Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher before being convicted of perjury in 1989 for lying about hidden Swiss bank accounts. Akbar's career follows a similar arc: a dilettante at Cambridge, a failed theater manager, and an abortive record label in Los Angeles called Soulife, where he burned through family money before the venture collapsed. His friend Sanjiv Bhattacharya later reflects on the irony of the surname: "Akbar Sham-ji. Akbar, the great sham." By February 2019, the same period when he first met "Zac Ismailov," Akbar had declared bankruptcy. Verinder, known in criminal circles as "Indian Dave," is far more dangerous. A businessman who knew him tells Keefe that Verinder was volatile and had a signature method of intimidation: "holding them over the edge of a balcony."

Text messages recovered by police reveal that in Zac's final days, Verinder was growing furious. "I want 5% of that 205 million," he wrote. "He's not allowed to run away now." That evening, Akbar texted his friend Mervin Sealy: "I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood." A longtime associate of Verinder later confirms to Keefe that "warming up the knife" was Indian Dave's signature technique: heating a blade on a stove and walking toward his victim. One of the last things Zac did before he jumped was search on his iPad for "what to do with skin burns."

The Brettlers grow increasingly frustrated with Scotland Yard. Detective Inspector Rory Wilkinson repeatedly suggests Zac may have died by suicide while failing to interview key witnesses. The Crown Prosecution Service declines to charge Akbar. In December 2020, Verinder himself dies of an apparent drug overdose. At a December 2022 inquest into Zac's death, investigators reveal that one area of balcony glass appeared recently wiped clean and that dark spatters resembling blood were found in the apartment, but samples were never collected or tested. Akbar testifies that his memory of the evening is "foggy" and that "blood" was slang for "bro." The coroner delivers an "open verdict," neither murder nor suicide.

GPS data from a black box in Akbar's rental Mercedes, mistakenly disclosed by police, reveals that on the night of Zac's death, Akbar drove in circles near Riverwalk as if waiting for something to happen. At 2:12 a.m., Verinder called him; Akbar immediately accelerated to fifty miles per hour, racing back to arrive at 2:23, seconds before Zac left the balcony. Police had the data but never analyzed it. Keefe also uncovers a generational pattern of concealed double lives: Hugo Gryn had fathered a daughter out of wedlock named Ester, who died by suicide in 2006. Rachelle reflects on how secrecy and its consequences recur across the family.

The book's final scene returns to a summer afternoon in 2019. After a family party, Zac tells his parents to phone when they approach Vauxhall Bridge. As they drive past MI6, Rachelle calls, and the family looks up to see Zac on the fifth-floor balcony, a tiny figure, waving. Keefe concludes that the truth, stripped of its confounding details, is not complicated. Zac pretended to be the son of an oligarch. He fell in with two men attracted to his imaginary fortune: one a bankrupt charlatan, the other an aging gangster looking for a final score. When they realized they had been tricked, Zac found himself trapped. Aware of the gangster's capacity for violence, he walked onto the balcony and leapt toward the Thames.