Death on the Thames

The latest page-turner from New York narrative non-fiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) manages to do many things well.

London Falling is an expertly paced true-crime mystery, a vertiginous plunge into London’s criminal underworld, an infuriating exposé of a weak and incompetent justice system and a heartbreaking portrait of parental grief. It’s also an ode to old-school investigative journalism, and to the author’s ability to patiently unwind a tale that is truly stranger than fiction.

Keefe is a decorated New Yorker staff writer who is drawn to big topics and big personalities. He excels at reporting on crime and corruption, yet is also capable of great empathy and poignancy. His vivid world-building, eye for detail and irony and masterful grasp of structure make his books read like novels.

London Falling chronicles the death of Zac Brettler, a precocious 19-year-old from a loving, upper-middle-class home who, late one night in 2019, plunges to his death from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury residential tower located directly across the River Thames from MI6 headquarters, whose security cameras capture Zac’s anguished final moments.

Did Zac jump out of a desire to end his life? Or because he was pressured? Or in a desperate, last-ditch bid to escape a dangerous situation?

Only after Zac’s death do his parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, learn their son had been posing as the son of a fictional dead Russian oligarch. This ruse, which Zac developed at school and honed in business dealings, gained him entry into a world populated by a cast of sketchy characters borrowing money to spend money to make money.

The book’s other main character is London itself, exposed as an obsequious parking pad for the world’s wealth. Keefe skewers the city’s “glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture,” showing how the collapse of the Soviet Union, coupled with decades of deregulation, effectively rolled out the welcome mat for Russian oligarchs and their ill-gotten wealth. “(O)ne consequence of London’s new identity as a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money,” he writes, “is that the city is full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who seem a little crooked.”

Two such men are the last to see Zac alive: Verinder Sharma, a menacing gang enforcer and debt collector, and Akbar Shamji, a glamorous but slippery investor. Keefe slowly widens the net, investigating their associates and bringing Zac’s secretive final months into greater focus.

The investigation — replete with tax shelters, shell companies, Rolls-Royces, glass-walled apartments and private clubs — is fascinating. But the book’s greatest strength is its nuanced, empathetic portraits of Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, who are thoughtful and articulate as they recount the difficult months before and after Zac’s death. In a strange way, they come to know their adult son more in death than they did in life.

The police investigation into Zac’s death is almost comically shoddy. At one point, the Brettlers wait an astonishing two years for an update from the lead detective. When Keefe is introduced to the family and begins his own investigation, he writes, “I was able to track down quite quickly certain witnesses whom the police had never fully identified.” He so thoroughly exposes the “institutional culture of timidity in English police departments” that one hopes the book spurs reforms.

Some readers may find the book too discursive — one passage chronicles Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asian Ugandans in the 1970s, then recounts a dramatic London gold heist in the ’80s — and its large cast of shady characters too difficult to keep straight.

But Keefe always brings the narrative back to the Brettlers, grounding this remarkable true story in their grief, their love and their resilience.

Jordan Ross is a writer and photographer in Winnipeg’s West End. Follow him on Bluesky at @jordanross.bsky.social.