Keefe's London Falling probes Russian oligarch corruption through teen's mysterious death

Patrick Radden Keefe has spent two decades becoming one of America's most consequential narrative nonfiction writers—the kind whose new book arrives with genuine anticipation. His last two works, Say Nothing about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Empire of Pain about the Sackler family's role in the opioid crisis, won major prizes and were adapted for streaming. His fifth book, London Falling, arrived last month with considerable fanfare, and it opens with a death that spirals outward into something far larger: the story of how London became a haven for Russian money and the violence that money enabled.

Zac Brettler was nineteen when he fell from a luxury high-rise apartment in the early hours of November 29, 2019. He came from a comfortable middle-class family, but he was drawn to wealth and power in ways that worried no one until they should have. He loved The Wolf of Wall Street. He admired Vladimir Putin. He told people democracy was overrated. He was the kind of young man who told tall tales so consistently that friends called him out as a liar. Then he moved out of home and invented a false identity: he claimed to be the son of a Russian oligarch. He fell in with shady businesspeople and violent criminals. His parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, were left trying to understand not just his death but the elaborate deceptions that preceded it. His mother described the effort as trying to piece together a jigsaw in the dark.

Keefe structures the book as a true crime mystery, complete with cliffhanger chapter endings, and he follows the Brettlers' desperate search for answers. Did Zac have a psychological breakdown? Was he so frightened of the criminals he was associating with—particularly a man named Verinder Sharma, known as Indian Dave—that he jumped? Zac had told Sharma his fictional oligarch father was worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The book's power lies partly in what Keefe calls the "maddening incuriosity" of the police investigation. Evidence was not gathered before the apartment was cleaned. GPS data showing Akbar Shamji's exact movements before and after Zac's death went unexamined. The questioning of Shamji, who was in the apartment that night, had what Keefe describes as the punch of overcooked pasta.

But Zac's death is really the entry point into a much larger story about institutional corruption. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian money flooded into London. In 2008, the UK introduced a visa program allowing foreign nationals to invest millions of pounds in exchange for permanent residency. One in four of the three thousand people who took advantage of this program over the next seven years were Russian. Boris Johnson, then lord mayor and later prime minister, boasted that London was to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra were to orangutans. The arriving oligarchs needed lawyers, bankers, tax agents, security consultants, real estate agents, and spin doctors. A generation of ambitious British professionals, as Keefe writes, "enthusiastically signed on to serve as fixers of every stripe," performing what he calls the "paperwork jujitsu" of moving funds out of Russia and hiding or laundering the cash.

This moral elasticity came with a cost. Over time, an alarming number of Russians living in England and their associates began dying—by poison, by falls from high-rise apartments, by other means. A 2017 Buzzfeed investigation listed fourteen suspicious deaths among those who had made powerful enemies in Russia. The authorities' apparent indifference stemmed partly from budget cuts; half the police stations in England had been closed since 2010. But it also stemmed from something more systemic: the country had become overly reliant on Russian oligarchs' money and influence. As Keefe notes, decisions had been made at high levels not to prosecute London's new mafia class but to extend to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies in England with impunity.

Keefe draws a parallel to Russia itself. In the same year Zac died, journalist Heidi Blake published From Russia with Blood, describing how Russians had become acculturated to a "dissonance" in everyday life—the understanding that a suicide or overdose or fall might be a euphemism for murder. Corrupted institutions and a weak press erased any reliable line between fact and conspiracy. Blake called it a "fog of ambiguity." The deeper the Brettlers dug into their son's death, the more they felt the same eerie dissonance that afflicts Russian society.

Keefe is a meticulous researcher—his endnotes in London Falling run to twenty-eight two-columned pages—and he takes seriously both his obligations to the people he writes about and to his readers. The Brettlers granted him extraordinary access, laying bare what they describe as a private and painful history. They recognized, Keefe writes, that the only way to tell a story of compounding deceptions was with honesty that was bracing, unblinking, and complete. The book feels commensurate with that gesture. Yet because Keefe focuses primarily on the single case of Zac Brettler rather than exploring multiple cases pointing to the broader corrupting influence of Russian oligarchs on London, London Falling does not quite achieve the resonance of his masterpieces. Say Nothing helps you understand decades of political violence in Northern Ireland. Empire of Pain exposed how a single family's company devastated hundreds of thousands of lives. London Falling is definitely worth reading—it has Keefe's characteristic blend of clear storytelling and vivid, compassionate portraits—but it remains, ultimately, the story of one family's search for truth in a fog of ambiguity.