After reading Say Nothing, his account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe entered the vaunted “I will read anything this man puts out” territory for me. I read his books about the OxyContin crisis and Chinese immigration despite having no personal connection or any great interest in those subjects. So there was no question that I was going to pick up London Falling, even though I had no awareness of the story at the center of the book. Radden Keefe has set his sights on a smaller story, one that hadn’t really even made the newspapers, and he has used it to explore contemporary London in all sorts of ways.
In November 2019, a nineteen-year-old named Zac Brettler jumped from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment complex across the street from the headquarters of MI6. Though his parents had been worried about him, they were stunned that he had apparently chosen to end his life. They also had no idea how he had wound up at the building in question.
It turned out that Zac, whose parents were comfortably well-off but not outrageously so, was living a double-life, driven by his insatiable desire to be wealthy. Zac, who had always had a penchant for making up stories and little lies about his life, was getting bolder. The Brettlers discovered that their son was going around and pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch looking to invest money in business opportunities. Somehow, Zac’s story kept fooling people you’d really think would be a little more suspicious, and he ended up connecting with some really unsavory characters, men who were used to getting what they want, and what they wanted from Zac was money he didn’t actually have.
Radden Keefe digs in and gets to the bottom of who these unsavory characters are, how they got their money, and how they’ve evaded law enforcement so successfully for so long. Like all true crime narratives, there are colorful characters and outrageous exploits by the dozen, but Radden Keefe is meticulous about keeping the tragedy of Zac’s death at the heart of the story, meaning that the reader remains horrified at the violence instead of intrigued or luridly entertained.
The investigation into the two main antagonists, Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, leads Radden Keefe on a trail that takes him both around the globe and into every nook and cranny of London. Shamji, a crooked businessman who learned how to finance a business empire on debt from his father, and Sharma, a ruthless debt collector for underworld figures who was unafraid to get his hands dirty, had their fingers in a lot of pies. Shamji’s varied career included stints owning a theater and a record label as well as working in bitcoin and AI, while Sharma, a less public figure, was no less diversified in his criminal interests.
Radden Keefe also manages to highlight the corruption and dysfunction at the heart of many London institutions, from the banks that keep lending money to charlatans to the police who let the rich get away with literal murder. Radden Keefe’s London is a city which has seemingly sacrificed every bit of its integrity on the altar of foreign money. It’s a disheartening, disturbing, and necessary read.
