LONDON FALLING: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe has published some of the most memorable nonfiction books of the last decade. His biography of the Sackler family, “Empire of Pain” (2021), was a riveting account of how the makers of OxyContin fueled an opioid epidemic. In “Say Nothing” (2019), he used the story of a long-ago abduction in Northern Ireland — a mother taken from her home, in front of her children — to explore the violent history of the Troubles.
Keefe’s track record of writing about emotionally complex, morally fraught subjects with sensitivity and skill is why he was tipped off to the painful story underpinning his new book, “London Falling.” In 2023, he was spending the summer in London, working on the television adaptation of “Say Nothing,” when a friend of the director introduced Keefe to Matthew and Rachelle Brettler. The Brettlers had experienced a terrible tragedy. In November 2019, their younger son, Zac, 19, disappeared; it was several days before a body that washed up on a bank of the River Thames was identified as his.
“The Brettlers felt isolated — and angry,” Keefe writes. According to surveillance camera footage, at 2:23 a.m. on Nov. 29, Zac had walked onto a fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury building in the tony neighborhood of Pimlico, and jumped. Living in the apartment was a middle-aged man named Verinder Kumar Sharma, a notorious gangster in London’s underworld who was better known as “Indian Dave.” Sharma wasn’t the only person in this story with an alias: The Brettlers learned that their son had been passing himself off to Sharma and others as Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch.
The circumstances around Zac’s death certainly appeared suspicious. Yet Scotland Yard seemed bent on treating it as if it were just another suicide, discounting and even ignoring evidence that suggested more nefarious possibilities. The year before Keefe met the Brettlers, the coroner presiding over the inquest landed on a maddeningly ambiguous ruling: The cause was neither murder nor suicide.
The Brettlers were private people, and they had chosen not to go public after Zac’s death. London’s tabloids would have turned a time of mourning into a media circus. But that kind of attention could have also helped the Brettlers, by exerting pressure on Scotland Yard.
“There was no indication in the press or anywhere on the internet that Zac had died, much less that his life had ended under such confounding circumstances,” Keefe writes, recalling the Brettlers’ grief and frustration. “They had just been starting to wonder what more they could do” when their friend visited the set of “Say Nothing” “and happened to bump into me.”
Keefe, a staff writer for The New Yorker, decided to pursue the story, spending lots of time talking with Matthew, Rachelle and their older son — and now only surviving child — Joe. The more Keefe examined the details, including documents related to the case, the more he began to see how the family was “not wrong to feel the investigation had been mishandled.”
Zac is at the center of “London Falling.” But Keefe situates his death on a bigger canvas: a city that has tried to address its collapsing industrial base by becoming increasingly dependent on oligarch money, and a police force that is woefully underfunded and plagued by complacency and corruption.
As for Zac, his parents remember a happy, outgoing child who delighted in entertaining them with his imitations of family friends and his impressive mimicry of foreign accents. They noticed a marked change when Zac was around 13 and was rejected by the prestigious, academically rigorous private school that his brother attended; Zac was admitted instead to another private school, one filled with the scions of new money and lower down, Rachelle says, on the “pecking order.”
In his new-money school, Zac became obsessed with conspicuous displays of wealth, badgering his parents to get a bigger home and a fancier car. The Brettlers were undeniably well off. Matthew worked in finance; Rachelle was a journalist who wrote regularly for The Financial Times’s glossy magazine, How to Spend It. “But they made a point of living within their means,” Keefe writes. They were baffled by Zac’s increasingly ostentatious tastes, which he paid for with “little entrepreneurial schemes,” like reselling sneakers and dealing loosies. One day he hired a chauffeured limousine to drive him home, explaining, “I wanted to see what it would feel like.”
Zac’s efforts at self-reinvention kept escalating. He started telling his parents that he was helping to broker high-end real estate deals, and he seemed to know people connected to the Russian oligarch-owned Chelsea Football Club. One of his Chelsea contacts introduced him to Akbar Shamji, a mysterious businessman whose daughter happened to go to school with Zac. Shamji, in turn, introduced Zac to Sharma. Both men said that Zac had claimed to be an oligarch’s son, and both were among the last people to see Zac alive. Shamji left Sharma’s apartment before Zac jumped, and returned to the apartment minutes after.
What happened that night? Did Zac intend to kill himself? Or was he trying to escape Sharma’s apartment? According to Sharma and Shamji, Zac had broken down in front of them, saying how depressed he was. But Zac didn’t have depression, Rachelle says; he must have sensed he was in danger and, as a born performer, was doing his best to elicit sympathy. “Feel sorry for me,” is what she believed Zac must have meant; “don’t hurt me.”
Maybe. But Zac, it turns out, was also telling friends other than Sharma and Shamji about feeling intensely sad and lonely. Is it possible that Zac was overwhelmed with emotions that he kept hidden from his parents? Being a trickster and fabulist was one thing; how did Zac slide from doing funny impressions to tangling with the criminal underworld?
While the book raises these thorny questions, Keefe seems reluctant to fully explore them. He is a master builder of intricate narratives, arranging the many pieces just so. “London Falling” suggests that Zac’s story is ultimately a crime story, in a city so warped by money that it’s losing its bearings.
But it’s necessarily a family story, too. Keefe is too assiduous a journalist to be in thrall to the family’s perspective. Yet given the ordeal they endured, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the narrative — in what gets emphasized and what doesn’t — hews so closely to their point of view. In his acknowledgments, Keefe thanks the Brettlers for entrusting him with something so difficult and so painful: “I hope I’ve written a book that feels commensurate with the magnitude of that gesture.”
LONDON FALLING: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth | By Patrick Radden Keefe | Doubleday | 361 pp. | $35
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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