In the small hours of 29 November 2019, a young man was captured on CCTV jumping from a fifth-floor flat on Millbank on the Thames. His body struck the embankment wall on the way down, and he drowned in the water below. It emerged that he was 19-year-old Zac Brettler, a former public schoolboy from Maida Vale known for telling “tall stories”, said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. That night, he’d been in the apartment with “gangland debt collector” Verinder Sharma, and another associate, a cryptocurrency and real estate trader named Akbar Shamji. There was evidence that the two men, who’d befriended Brettler weeks earlier, had assaulted him shortly before his death – though neither was charged by police, who concluded that the death was probably suicide.
In this “scrupulously researched” and “page-turning” book, The New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keefe revisits the case – and reaches a different conclusion. Opening a disturbing window onto Britain’s capital, with its dirty money and “Walter Mitty-like” fantasies of wealth, “London Falling” is a “grimly absorbing” work.
Despite coming from a comfortable background, Brettler always “wanted more”, said Craig Brown in The Times. At his north London private school, he’d rubbed shoulders with the “offspring of dodgy oligarchs”, and envied “the way they would hire Ubers rather than walk a few minutes from dormitory to classroom”. He compensated by spinning fantasies: it emerged that when he’d met Sharma and Shamji, he’d posed as “Zac Ismailov, the son of an oligarch”, and had claimed he was about to come into a £200 million fortune. Radden Keefe suggests that this “bogus boast” is what sealed his fate – that when the pair discovered that he’d conned them, they lured him to the apartment to exact revenge. Brettler jumped, he thinks, in order to escape, believing he’d land directly in the water.
Radden Keefe – best known for “Empire of Pain”, his exposé of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid epidemic – specialises in character-based narratives from which “wider moral themes emerge”, said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. “London Falling” is at heart a “desperately sad family story”, but Radden Keefe overlays this with a “disturbing glimpse of London’s sinister, money-driven, exploitative underbelly”. There are a few minor slips: no Londoner would think of calling Park Lane “a short street”. Overall, however, this “impeccable” book is a “masterclass of evidence-chasing, narrative clarity and authorial empathy”.
Investigation into the mysterious death of a teenage boy shines a light on the capital’s ‘sinister, exploitative, money-driven underbelly’
