The best true-crime stories use a particular event as a key to unlock a world, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest work of investigative nonfiction, London Falling, does just that. At first glance, I winced a bit at the book’s title. This is the story of a 19-year-old boy named Zac Brettler, who in 2019 plunged to his death from the balcony of a fifth-floor apartment overlooking the Thames into the river below. Using a pun off an old Clash song seemed an overly cheeky way to refer to such a tragedy. In the end, however, Keefe’s choice makes perfect sense. At the heart of every true-crime narrative are two questions: What really happened, and who was to blame? Keefe—a celebrated staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain—finds, in the death of one teenager, both a private loss and a parable of the decay of a once great city.
Whether any crime at all occurred when Zac died in the early hours of Nov. 29 is a point of contention in London Falling. Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle, insisted that their son was not suicidal. The police, who had surveillance footage showing the boy jumping from the balcony, maintained that they could not prove otherwise. The Brettlers—who served as Keefe’s primary sources for the book and the New Yorker article that preceded it in 2024—are sure that two older men whom Zac had befriended, including 55-year-old Verinder “Dave” Sharma, resident of the apartment from which the boy fell, must somehow be responsible for his death.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth
By Patrick Radden Keefe. Doubleday.
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The comfortably middle-class Brettlers—Matthew does an advanced form of accounting; Rachelle is a lifestyle journalist—are both the children of Holocaust survivors. Rachelle’s father was a beloved rabbi known for his regular appearances on BBC radio broadcasts, speaking on matters of faith. Matthew’s father worked in the textile industry and was famed for his remarkable memory. They were a nice Jewish family in every sense of the term, sending their two sons to the best private schools they could afford, which in Zac’s case, given his weak grades, was a place called Mill Hill, attended by affluent but not especially academic kids. “There was more money,” Keefe writes, of this new environment in comparison to the Brettlers’ own neighborhood, “and more new money, specifically.” There, Zac met the children of the Russian oligarchs who had flooded into the city beginning in the late 1990s, kids so rich that, on cold mornings, they would take Ubers to avoid an eight-minute walk between school buildings.
The events leading up to Zac’s fall from the balcony of the Riverwalk complex that night braid together several backstories of families who came to England seeking refuge or better lives. As remarkable as Keefe’s New Yorker article was, London Falling—which has already been claimed by A24 to turn into a TV series—gives him the space to fully retrace these threads before adeptly winding them back together again. Sharma’s parents immigrated from Northern India and, like Matthew’s, found a foothold in the textile industry. Akbar Shamji, the businessman in his 40s who had introduced Zac to Sharma, came from a family of Indian descent who were forced to flee Uganda when Idi Amin took over the country in the 1970s.
Soon after Zac started attending Mill Hill, he began rebelling against Matthew and Rachelle and their way of life. He nagged his parents to buy a fancier car and a house in a posher neighborhood. He became obsessed with the lifestyles of the very wealthy and expressed “how much he admired the unfathomably rich, unfathomably corrupt, casually homicidal kleptocrat who ruled Russia, Vladimir Putin.” He even hired a limousine to pick him up at school one day, just “to see what it would feel like.” His parents, bewildered at having raised a child with values so different from their own, listened to him talk of making deals and going into business and hoped that he might eventually find his way through these precocious forays into capitalism. They knew about his friendship with Shamji, who took on Zac as a protégé, but had never met the man.
When Zac disappeared in late November, his mother sought Shamji out, only to learn that her son had presented an entirely bogus identity to his mentor. He’d told Shamji that his name was Zac Ismailov and that his father had been a Russian oligarch, recently deceased, from whom he would eventually inherit 205 million pounds. But while Zac was playing Shamji, Shamji was playing Zac. He was (and by all accounts still is) a scammer who financed his luxurious lifestyle by starting various businesses, soliciting investments, then skipping out when his investors started to get wise. All this he’d learned from his own father, who had claimed to be resurrecting the fortune the family had lost in Uganda, while leaving a trail of unpaid debts behind him.
Keefe examines just one of these enterprises in depth, the story of the Mermaid Theatre, the first theater to be built in London’s venerable financial district since Shakespeare’s time. Established by a pair of idealistic thespians in 1959, the venue enjoyed some successes, but by the ’80s it had run out of funds and was sold to Shamji’s father, who in 1993 put Akbar in charge of it. Akbar proceeded to run the business into the ground, squandering its funds on stunts like flying Muhammad Ali to London for the premiere of a play about the boxer’s life. The theater presented hardly any shows, and one investor believes to this day that it was a money-laundering operation. The Shamjis dissolved the company in the late 1990s, and its original founders died penniless. The artistic director Akbar had hired (and then fired a year later) told Keefe that Akbar “wanted to be like his father. But the father was a crook, simple as that. If you shook hands with him, you’d count your fingers afterwards.”
As for Verinder Sharma, the ostensible owner of the luxury apartment Zac leaped from, he was not a rubber tycoon, as Zac had told his mother, but a gangster known and feared in the criminal underworld as “Indian Dave.” Sharma was implicated in the murder of a former associate he suspected of being an informant and made his living by scaring people into repaying debts owed to his clients. The apartment was just a loan from a guy who owed Sharma money. This subplot provides Keefe with the opportunity to take a fascinating jaunt through the changing focus of organized crime in the U.K., from robbing banks to dealing drugs.
While Keefe eventually comes up with a plausible scenario of what happened to Zac, for multifarious reasons—primarily that everyone involved was a liar—we’ll never know the truth for sure. In the end, however, all the stories Keefe assembles in London Falling strongly suggest that it was the city that destroyed the boy. The same country that had provided opportunity for his grandparents’ generation, and in whose decency his parents naively believed, had, after decades of deregulation, become a playground of unfettered capitalism. Shady oligarchs and international criminals bought up London real estate as investments, leaving some of the city’s poshest neighborhoods—including the building Zac leaped from—nearly and eerily vacant. Drug dealers and con men corrupted the police. And an online culture that glorified the most conspicuous forms of consumption—Zac was a social media addict—convinced a privileged young man whose parents deeply loved him that he was deprived. It’s not just a 19-year-old who seems to plummet endlessly through the pages of London Falling, but the city he grew up in, and that led him so badly astray.