"London Falling" | Reviewed by William Winkler

Early in the morning of November 29, 2019, a young man plunged to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking London’s Thames River. His body was not discovered until four days later, three days after his parents notified the London police that he was missing.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His recent book, “London Falling,” details the events leading up to Zac Brettler’s death and the painstaking efforts of his parents to learn the truth behind it.

In the last decades of the 20^th century London had transitioned from a manufacturing and maritime center to an international hub for high finance, particularly attractive to ultra wealthy oligarchs from Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. Young Brettler was an ostensibly normal teenager until his 17^th year, when he discovered the intrigue of great wealth and the subterfuge frequently accompanying it.

In the two years prior to his death, Brettler invented an entirely new persona, leading others to believe he was the son of an ultra-wealthy Kazakh entrepreneur. As he found his way more deeply into the London underworld, Zac was drawn into the orbits of two dangerous members of that culture. The night of his death, he was in the apartment of one of them.

The circumstances behind his death went undiscovered until a clip from a British Intelligence surveillance camera, located across the Thames at MI6 headquarters, pinpointed the time and circumstances of his leap from the balcony. With this bit of data, the London police labeled Zac’s death a suicide. But to his parents many questions went unanswered.

The story of their relentless search, often turning up information that seemed contrary to the police investigation, revealed to them how deeply their son had become entangled with London’s deeply unsavory world of shadowy power and corrosive wealth.

Author Keefe’s intensive research and extensive documentation will introduce the reader to a side of the great British metropolis that its leaders and apologists would likely prefer to be left unsaid.

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