One of the most frustrating experiences for a journalist is when a story turns out to be less than it seemed. A rise in deaths has a banal statistical explanation, a juicy tale is an exaggerated rumor, a source turns out to be more boastful than accurate.

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Say Nothing shot him into the rare position of a celebrity journalist, is a very fine writer and reporter, and so he has made a highly readable book out of material that was, I suspect, not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (expanded from a 2024 New Yorker piece), begins with a teenager’s mysterious death that seems connected to a world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and more intimate than the mystery first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

One of the most frustrating experiences for a journalist is when a story turns out to be less than it seemed. A rise in deaths has a banal statistical explanation, a juicy tale is an exaggerated rumor, a source turns out to be more boastful than accurate.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe, Doubleday, 384 pp., $35, April 2026

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Say Nothing shot him into the rare position of a celebrity journalist, is a very fine writer and reporter, and so he has made a highly readable book out of material that was, I suspect, not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (expanded from a 2024 New Yorker piece), begins with a teenager’s mysterious death that seems connected to a world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and more intimate than the mystery first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, jumped to his death from the fifth floor of Riverwalk, a glitzy apartment building overlooking the Thames. In one of the story’s many coincidences, his leap was caught by a surveillance camera on the building across the water, the headquarters of MI6, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the CIA.

The circumstances of Brettler’s death were immediately suspicious. The 19-year-old had gotten caught up with two older men: the then-47-year-old Akbar Shamji and the 50-something Verinder Sharma, both of whom had been in the apartment he leapt from that night. He had told his parents he was wheeling and dealing in the world of the London rich, striking deals with Russian oligarchs to buy apartments and investing in mining projects in Kazakhstan. Shamji said he knew Brettler as “Zac Ismailov,” a young man who claimed to be the disinherited son of........

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