By Coral Gables Gazette staff
There is a particular kind of Patrick Radden Keefe book. It begins with a death or a disappearance — something specific, something human — and ends having illuminated an entire system of institutional failure, concentrated power, and moral compromise that the reader did not fully understand before. Say Nothing began with a mother of ten abducted from her Belfast home and ended as the most complete reckoning with the violence of the Troubles written in this century. Empire of Pain began with a pharmaceutical dynasty and ended with a portrait of how American institutions allowed a crisis to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth begins with a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler stepping onto the balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames at 2:24 in the morning and jumping into the river below.
Keefe brings that book to Coral Gables on Friday, April 10, at 7 p.m. Books & Books is hosting an evening with the author at the Coral Gables Congregational Church, 3010 De Soto Boulevard. Tickets are required and include a copy of London Falling. A book signing will follow the discussion.
The story at the center
Zac Brettler was the grandson of a celebrated London rabbi, the son of a banker and a journalist, a privately educated boy from an affluent neighborhood in west London who was, by every external measure, headed somewhere reasonable. He was also, by the time of his death, living a secret life. He had constructed an alter ego — Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a fortune — and used it to insert himself into the company of men who operated at the intersection of money, crime, and violence. One of them was a feared London gangster known as Indian Dave. Another was a shadowy businessman named Akbar Shamji. It was in Shamji’s apartment — a $5 million flat in a luxury tower opposite MI6 — that Zac spent his last night.
Scotland Yard conducted an investigation. The conclusion was effectively inconclusive. The police had surveillance footage of Zac on the balcony. They had no evidence they were prepared to act on. The case was closed.
Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, could not accept that conclusion. They hired private investigators. They conducted their own inquiries. They pushed against COVID restrictions, a sluggish Metropolitan Police, and the particular frustration of being told that the circumstances of their son’s death were simply unknowable. In 2023, through a family friend who had officiated Zac’s bar mitzvah, they were introduced to Keefe. He was on the set of the FX adaptation of Say Nothing at the time. He listened to their story and did not let go of it.
The result is London Falling — first a New Yorker article in 2024, now a full book, already acquired by A24 for a television adaptation.
What the book reveals
Keefe’s method has always been to use the particular to illuminate the systemic. In London Falling the particular is Zac’s death. The systemic is what London has become — a city remade, as Keefe writes, as a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money, where illicit fortunes from oligarchs, arms merchants, and drug dealers are washed clean with the willing complicity of lawyers, bankers, and a government that looked the other way for decades.
The arrival of Russian money in London was not coincidental but a deliberate political decision. Until it was scrapped after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a golden visa introduced in 2008 offered fast-track residency for foreign nationals in exchange for investments in the UK economy. That policy and the culture it produced shaped the world Zac wandered into. He was, as Keefe describes him, a teenager with a Walter Mitty quality — well-off but not rich, obsessed with the trappings of wealth he saw on social media, desperate to belong to a world that was not his. The oligarchs and gangsters and aspirational fraudsters he attached himself to were not anomalies in London’s gilded landscape. They were, in a sense, its products.
The reviews have been unanimous. Kirkus gave it a starred review and called it a potential classic. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it a remarkable new turn for the celebrated author. NPR described Keefe as a master at using true crime as a vehicle for exploring social and political pathologies. The book has been named a most anticipated title by the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Time, and Oprah Daily.
The author
Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is the author of Say Nothing, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the twenty best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review; Empire of Pain, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize; and Rogues, a collection of his New Yorker profiles. He served as executive producer on the FX adaptation of Say Nothing and created the podcast Wind of Change, named the number one podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.
He is, by any measure, one of the most accomplished nonfiction writers working in the English language. An evening with him at the Coral Gables Congregational Church on April 10 is not a routine author event. It is an opportunity to hear the person behind some of this century’s most consequential journalism discuss the book he has been working toward for the past two years.
AN EVENING WITH PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
What: Books & Books author event and book signing for London Falling
When: Friday, April 10, 7 p.m.
Where: Coral Gables Congregational Church, 3010 De Soto Blvd., Coral Gables
Tickets: Required; include one copy of London Falling. Available at Books & Books website. Book: London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth — Doubleday, 384 pages, $35
