Review: "London Falling," Patrick Radden Keefe

In 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler fell from the balcony of a luxury riverside apartment in London and died. His body was found in the Thames days later.

Or was he pushed?

Or was he trying to escape from a terrifying situation?

Zac came from a close-knit, well-off family and had attended private schools. His father, Matthew worked in finance; his mother, Rachelle, was a freelance writer. He had an older brother, Joe.

Both of his grandparents were Holocuast survivors. Baruch “Benny” Brettler had escaped from Germany on one of the last “Kindertransports” out of the country. Hugo Gryn survived Auschwitz to become a well-known, well-loved rabbi with his own radio show.

But Zac seemed obsessed with wealth from an early age. He had a fascination, for example, with luxury cars. Zac had an impressive memory, perhaps inherited from Benny. He was glib and charming from an early age. At four or five, an older girl teased him at a family function asking him to read something. Zac said, “I didn’t bring my glasses.”

His quirky humor attracted many friends as he became a teenager and entered a private school. But after a while, his lies and exaggerations turned them off.

Zac told people he was unbelievably wealthy. He claimed he was the son of a Russian oligarch. 

Matthew and Rachelle were concerned about their son. He was moody and seemed to lack ambition for following a normal career path. But they had no idea of how he was presenting himself, or the bad actors—true villains— he would eventually get involved with.

In the late 20th century, London transformed itself from the moribund Thatcher years. It’s now a thriving financial center. Oligarchs and sultans own lavish estates that stand empty most of the year. Money flows freely and illegally. There was plenty of trouble for a boy like Zac—ambitious in ways he kept hidden from his parents—to get into.

And he did—with a shady businessman, Akbar Shamji, and a gangster called “Indian Dave.” The latter, real name Verinder Sharma, was known for his involvement in violent activity.

It would seem obvious to an outside observer that Zac’s charade couldn’t last long with those two. Apparently, it didn’t.

Patrick Radden Keefe has written a gripping, meticulously researched account of Zac’s life and death, the murky, treacherous careers of Shamji and Sharma, and the ordeal of Matthew and Rachelle. They were determined to find out what really happened to Zac, but it was a long and frustrating process. 

In the end, Keefe paints a plausible (but horrifying) scenario for Zac’s last hours. It is an amazing, touching, sad story, all told, with a dark, secret London at its core.