This is a book that I’ve been vaguely aware of for a while–IRL Book Group are big fans of PRK, as he is known around these parts, in particular Empire of Pain. A few of my friends went to a talk he gave as well, which might have been focused on this work. Non-fiction isn’t my jam, and neither are murder/mystery/thriller type works. But boy oh boy did PRK jam together both of those things and create a work that is so much more than the sum of its parts.
SO: in November 2019, a young boy named Zac falls to his death from the fifth floor of a flat along the Thames. His parents, shocked, proceed to spend the next few years trying to get some answers as to what happened. In doing so, they learn that their son was masquerading not as the upper middle class Londoner that he was but as the son and only heir of a Russian oligarch, and had successfully (?) convinced a number of people…but not the types of people you want to have convinced. Wrapped up in all of these stories are blood boiling tales of incompetence and apathy by the Met (the UK police force) and wanton disregard/look-away-ism by the entirety of the British financial and regulatory classes in the face of an influx of Eastern European wealth.
There’s a delicate balance one must strike in a work like this of moving the main plot forward and providing the oft-meandering context that grounds the details. This book was originally a New Yorker article, and despite not having read it I can probably work out for you the structure of the thing, because the NYTimes does it as well. You start with the personal angle as a hook, then move backwards a bit to provide some plot context, then dive into a digression on the societal/structural forces in which the plot lives, and then return to the story and its conclusion by the end. Done well, it makes for frankly addictive reading. I’ve spent many an hour reading longform journalism (the Texas arson case that reveals arson forensic science is fake! Dasani the ‘Invisible Child’ getting a scholarship to a boarding school in PA! why crowd crushes happen! the science of learning how to read! the bringing down of Bear Sterns! lead concentration in formerly redlined neighborhoods!) (okay I’ll stop)
A lot of credit goes to Keefe, of course. But Matthew and Rachelle, Zac’s parents, are stalwarts through all of the ups and downs, maintaining clear and detailed notes (including audio recordings) of everything they encountered. Any time you think “well that’s a very detailed recollection,” Keefe reminds you that x was recorded or y was collated, and you’re once again left in awe. And yet–and yet–this remains a frustratingly uncertain conclusion, and there’s only so much that can be done with that. Even still, or maybe because of that, the ending feels a bit overlong. I’m probably not the only one who would have taken a few more sentences elaborating how Akbar Shamji’s life was ruined by the article, but in truth we know that rich men get away with terrible crimes all the time.
I found Empire of Pain a lot less gripping, but it’s because I already knew so much about the opioid crisis that those contextual sections made my eyes glaze over. Here, it’s the exact opposite–I feel like I know not enough about the sordid underbelly of London despite living adjacent to it (as a banker) for a year and now living unaware of it (as a civvie???). Some of the references to criminal mythos might strike a local as unnecessary the way that Purdue’s corporate history was for me. But on the whole, this is an absolutely cracking book.
