PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE London Falling. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell

The award-winning author investigates the mysterious death of a teenage boy in London, and uncovers the dark side of the city itself.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s books are so deeply researched, and his storytelling so compelling, that readers might feel they are in the hands of a master thriller writer in the tradition of John le Carré. The prologue to London Falling – his latest work, about the mysterious death of a teenager and his family’s search for the truth – opens on the looming headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. MI6 occupies what Radden Keefe describes as an ‘imposing edifice of concrete and green glass’ on the banks of the Thames. When the building was constructed, the secrecy surrounding the project was so absolute that the architect commissioned to design it did not know who he was designing it for. It’s no accident that Radden Keefe chooses this forbidding image to open the book, and the sense of impenetrable secrecy it signifies pervades the entire story.

Radden Keefe’s 2018 book Say Nothing uncovered the silence surrounding the 1972 IRA kidnap and murder of a widowed mother of ten during the Troubles – and how her death shaped the lives of her children. London Falling considers a similar theme: the way a tragic, untimely death reverberates outward, especially when malign forces are also at play. It was in the summer of 2023, while a television adaptation of Say Nothing was being filmed, that Radden Keefe first heard about Zac Brettler’s fatal plunge from the balcony of a luxury apartment on the banks of the Thames. Visiting the set of the television show, the writer struck up a conversation with a friend of the director who happened to know the Brettler family.  In the aftermath of his death, Zac’s  parents had discovered that their son had been living a double life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. This detail hooked Radden Keefe immediately. The story was first published as a New Yorker article in 2024 and later expanded into this book.

In seeking to understand why Zac pretended to be someone else – and how it may have cost him his life – Radden Keefe traces London’s history as a shapeshifting centre of commerce. He examines how the Thatcher government’s deregulation of the financial markets in the 1980s gave rise to the city later becoming a haven for Russian oligarchs who made London home, bidding up the cost of prestige real estate and enrolling their children in its best schools. Zac Brettler grew up in London adjacent to this world, in a family that was comfortable but certainly not ultra-wealthy. Attending a relatively elite school, Mill Hill, he was able to observe the scions of Russia’s plutocrats at close range. The tragic result was his desperate desire to emulate their lives, a yearning sadly fuelled by the hollow promises of social media:

Zac Brettler’s teenage years coincided with a period of history during which the texture of human existence subtly changed. At night, he would lie in the darkness of his bedroom, his face aglow in the reflected light of his iPhone, and any momentary impulse he had, as expressed by his index finger on a touchscreen, could give rise to a kind of digital undertow, pulling him deeper into his own preoccupations. His interests — in supercars, rich people, luxury real estate — were compounded by the algorithm. Zac might not have been delusional in a clinical sense, but he did inhabit a world in which social media was beginning to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. Increasingly, any sense of a shared conscious existence was starting to give way to a more individualised, algorithmically bespoke form of virtual reality, in which our most personal and idiosyncratic anxieties and aspirations are reflected back at us, and magnified, by our smartphones.

A by-product of the city’s transformation – and the development of what Radden Keefe calls ‘a service sector for global plutocrats’ – are the colourful chancers and con artists greedy for a slice of the action. More troubling still is what the author calls London’s ‘criminal ecosystem’.

London is such a beautiful place that it can be easy, as you stroll around the city, to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder. London is the capital of pristine facades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is a literal whitewash. To launder something – whether it is cash or a reputation – is to mingle the dirty with the clean, and one consequence of London’s new identity as a 24-hour laundromat for dirty money is that the city is full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who seem a little crooked.

Enter Verinder Sharma, aka Indian Dave, a gangster with a comic moniker straight out of a Guy Ritchie caper, but altogether more dangerous.  Zac has been introduced to Indian Dave by Akbar Shamji, a charming but grotesque operator whose own origin story deserves a book: from the expulsion of his wealthy Ugandan-Asian family in the early 1970s by Idi Amin, through a failed stint as a music mogul in the United States and then on to further entrepreneurial disasters. The more Radden Keefe uncovers about these two men – both of whom apparently believed Zac really was the son of a Russian billionaire – the deeper the mystery becomes. As to the events leading up to Zac’s fatal fall, no definitive answer emerges. The reader is tantalised by new leads, only to face dead ends.  It is also worth noting that Zac was the grandson of Rabbi Hugo Gryn – a beloved figure in Britain, a Holocaust survivor who became a rabbi in the Reform denomination and later a well-known broadcaster. Rabbi Hugo led an extraordinary life, but also kept secrets from his family. Radden Keefe is struck not so much by any direct causality between the Rabbi’s hidden life and Zac’s, but by what he calls ‘the prevalence of secret lives in general’.

London Falling‘s title references punk band The Clash’s landmark 1979 song ‘London Calling’ – a track remarkable for its sense of apocalyptic dread, of rising waters and corrupt institutions. That same atmosphere of doom and moral rot pervades the book:

For five years, the Brettlers had spent an inordinate amount of time poring over the mystery of Zac’s death, and their diligence had exposed, at least partially, a matrix of power and secrecy and corruption in contemporary London, a dimension of their own city that they had never recognised before now. The very fact that some of their inquiries remained inconclusive seemed itself to speak to the malign power of the metropolis — the empty mansions, the offshore accounts, the tainted riches, the anonymous shell companies, the amoral businessmen, the predatory thugs, the incompetent authorities, the grandeur of all those dazzling surfaces obscuring a netherworld of shadow.

London Falling is an exceptional book and Patrick Radden Keefe is a peerless storyteller. The Brettlers’ grief is palpable throughout the narrative – they are dogged in pursuit of every last detail of their son’s secret life in the hope of getting answers. What is particularly affecting is the bravado and fragility of young men like Zac as they experiment with different personas and directions. The book is also a portrait of a city: one where police resources are stretched too thin, and where decades of easy money have left the capital exposed to corruption. It raises an interesting question about London’s global influence. Is it waning? Perhaps the time is ripe for another of London’s historic transformations, or perhaps it is already too late.

Patrick Radden Keefe London Falling Picador 2026 PB 384pp $36.99

Patrick Radden Keefe will be appearing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on 17 and 19 May.

Naomi Manuell is an award-winning Melbourne writer.

You can buy London Falling from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.