#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the
bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire
of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death
of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret
life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath
London’s glittering surface
In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the
headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing
back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of
the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.
In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was
worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend
for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled
up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.
In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to
understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way
seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did
not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had
adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and
heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a
slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known
as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death,
they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d
always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a
suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard
seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the
Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths
behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in
which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by
dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing
investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by
suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply
poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a
parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how
their son died, but of who he really was in life.
About the Author
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The
New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire
of Pain (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction),
and Say Nothing, which received a National Book Critics Circle
Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the Twenty-First Century
by The New York Times Book Review.
He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National
Magazine Award, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He served as an
executive producer on the awardwinning FX series Say Nothing and
is also the creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change,
which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named
the #1 podcast of 2020.
