This book is extraordinary. Rarely have I read anything so immaculately researched and compellingly written. Published in April 2026 and strap-lined “A mysterious death in a gilded city” it pounds along like a thriller. But tragically it isn’t fiction.
On 29 November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler fell to his death from the fifth-floor balcony of a block of luxury flats on the north bank of the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge. He was found in the river having struck, and badly damaged, his hip on the railings. And he had a freshly broken jaw but it was unclear whether this had occurred at the same time or before. CTCV cameras on the MI6 building across the river showed the fall but there was no sign of anyone else on the balcony. It looked like a simple suicide but the background unravelled by Patrick Radden Keefe tells a much more complicated story.
Zac was the son of middle-class parents living in Maida Vale. Matthew and Rachelle Brettler are both children of holocaust survivors and Rachelle’s late father became a well-known rabbi in North London who was often on the radio. Devastated by their son’s death, convinced Zac wasn’t suicidal and not happy with lackadaisical policing they began to make enquiries of their own.
What transpired is the stuff of unlikely fiction. Zac had been leading a double, fantasy life. He posed as the immensely wealthy son of a Russian oligarch, living in the prestigious One Hyde Park building and became involved with the classier end of London’s criminal underclass. These predatory men – mostly in the form of two Indians named Verinder (alias “Indian Dave”) Sharma and Akbar Shamji and their complex network of associates – mistakenly saw Zac as a source of funding for dodgy but lucrative investments. And it was all mixed up with drugs, night clubs and the occasional contract killing. Indian Dave, it emerges, quite late in the story was ruthless and terrifying. It is possible that he rumbled Zac and threated him with unthinkable torture which drove him to leap from the balcony in terror. But Indian Dave died in 2024 (although even that needs to be interrogated) so cannot be talked to. Why, Keefe wonders, had he spent so little time in prison given his gangster record? Could he have been a police informer? Cue for the police to close ranks when Keefe begins to speculate.
At first Matthew and Rachelle were reluctant to go public with their findings, every stage of which posed more questions. Eventually when Keefe got involved, they agreed to allow him to publish an article in the New Yorker and, of course, it went viral. And that was the starting point for this book.
Keefe is an American journalist who grew up in Boston and now lives in New York. His is a staff writer on the New Yorker. You would never guess his American background from this book, however, and I had to look it up. He understands every nuance of London – its geography, culture and people. And taking the reins from Matthew and Rachelle, with whom he has worked closely, he traces and talks to dozens of people who were, or are, involved with Verinder and Akbar. The latter incidentally is still alive and has never been charged with anything. I liked, for example, the story of the murderer who’d served several years and was now out on licence with a tag so he was able to meet and talk to Keefe, declaring he was going straight for the sake of his children. Soon after that interview, Keefe hears the man is back behind bars not for anything criminal but for taking his sons to a Crystal Palace match which was, apparently, outside the terms of his licence. Rather sad, really.
Keefe is exceptionally good at presenting huge amounts of detail and linking it with wide ranging background information. He writes mostly in short decisive sentences.
Of course he ends with thanks and acknowledgements, particularly to his legal checkers who must have had to work overtime. But he also includes pages and pages of detailed notes and references which make it impossible for us to doubt a single word he writes.
And, incidentally, I’m humbled, and faintly disconcerted, to learn what an enormous amount of information lies in the history of a person’s internet searches along with their phone calls and messages.
Many thanks to my nephew and his wife who recommended Falling London to me.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The One Day You Were My Husband by Rosie Walsh
