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London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday
361 pages
On November 29, 2019, a young London resident named Zac Brettler plunged from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment building into the Thames.
Did he accidentally fall? Was he pushed? Or, as his bereaved parents contend, did his association with London’s criminal underworld cause him to fear for his life and take the fatal leap instead?
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London Falling is veteran journalist Patrick Raden’s wide-ranging and often gripping effort to explain this mysterious death. The story opens with a panoramic view of present-day London, and describes how the once-renowned shipping port reinvented itself as a global financial capital with tenuous connections to exiled Russian oligarchs:
“The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 sparked one of the most dramatic wealth transfers in the history of the world, as large swaths of formerly state-owned industry were rapidly privatized, in a quick and messy fashion, under circumstances that were anything but transparent. If you were young, savvy, and unscrupulous, it was an amazing time to be a capitalist.”
Zac Brettler, the son of well-to-do professionals, was one of those young, savvy and evidently unscrupulous individuals seeking to exploit this transformation. Posing as the son of a Russian billionaire, he claimed to anyone who would listen that he stood to inherit 250 million pounds.
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Along the way, he struck up affiliations with highly dubious individuals such as Verinda Sharma, an underworld debt-collector and drug trafficker, who opened his luxury Riverwalk apartment to Zac and welcomed his frequent visits. Then there was Gary “Tyson” Nelson, who “bore a resemblance to the fighter Mike Tyson and had a hair-trigger temperament to match.”
But as his cover story unraveled, Zac began to fear for his physical safety. To put it simply, he was in way over his head and paid the price for it.
Sadly, Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, his loving, middle-class parents, had no knowledge of Zac’s elaborate subterfuge. Much of London Falling revolves around their valiant efforts to find out precisely what happened to their son. For a while, London police and Scotland Yard investigated the incident with no discernible results. Gradually, the Brettlers realized that accusing Russian oligarchs of complicity in Zac’s death was one thing; proving these criminals had any responsibility for their son’s plunge into the Thames was quite another:
“It was a strange sensation to move around St. John’s Wood, picking up groceries or stopping for a cup of tea in a café, and knowing that there might be people around them, people from their own community, who had connections to … elements of London’s criminal subculture and who perhaps knew more than they did about their son’s death.”
London Falling ranges improbably from London’s moneyed underworld to detailed accounts of the music business in Los Angeles and the horrors of Auschwitz. Keefe deftly guides us through a Byzantine maze of oligarchs and their hangers-on, recounting the story in an even-handed way.
Inevitably, the core of the tale centers on the young man’s duplicitous nature:
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“It may be that [Zac] came to understand something about the essential gullibility of human nature. Many of us have a default setting to believe other people. We take one another at face value to a degree that is shocking when you stop to think about it, not because we don’t recognize that deception exists but because, really, who has time to fact-check everything they hear?”
In a book of such depth and so many ancillary factors, there’s always the chance a reader can drown in a sea of false leads, background information, and an array of unsavory characters. But in London Falling, the pages keep turning. Stories like this may seem stranger than fiction, yet with compelling narrative talents, Keefe manages to pull it off.
Author Bio:
Highbrow Magazine chief book critic Lee Polevoi is the author of two novels, The Moon in Deep Winter and The Confessions of Gabriel Ash.
For Highbrow Magazine