London Falling

"Page-turner" is an over-used term, but it is the best description I can find for this book, which I could not put down. Carefully crafted, sensitively written and imaginatively structured, Keefe has written a masterly true crime story at its gripping best.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Jun 17, 2026

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling (London: Picador, 2026)

The passing of someone you love is incredibly difficult, but there is no hierarchy of grief – it is socially influenced not biologically determined. We all experience the pain death provokes differentially, depending on the relationship we had with the deceased. For example, I would not mourn the loss of an estranged family member, but I experience grief for the passing of a footballer who I grew up watching but never actually met. Nonetheless, if we accept that knowing the cause of someone’s death is an important part of coming to terms with their passing, then the catastrophic, unexplained death of a direct relative who we loved, surely ranks up there as the hardest for the average empathetic human being to deal with. When we learn that the deceased was living a secret life, closure on their death becomes an even more distant prospect, because there is a sense of guilt that they could not open up to us for help. The case of 19-year old Zac Brettler – an intelligent, warm, generous human being – is a totemic recent example of the way in which an unsolved passing of a young person with his whole life ahead of him leaves only questions and a vortex of grief into which it can be easy for families to fall but not easy to escape. How the police and Zac’s family went about solving the mystery surrounding his death provides the narrative force behind this excellent book. 

The police have a saying: “Learn how someone lived and you will learn how they died”. This is all very well, but it is easier to hypothesise the cause of death if someone’s life was a relatively open book. What if the deceased was masquerading as someone completely different, under an assumed surname, associating with people even his family and closest friends knew nothing about, and moving in social circles completely apart from their regular life? This is the situation that confronted Zac’s family after Zac went over the 5th floor balcony of a luxury Thames-front apartment, the Riverwalk, at the end of November 2019. Tracking the twists and turns of Zac’s parents’ unstinting search for the truth of their son’s demise, Keefe’s book shows how Zac’s family was forced to confront intensely challenging questions about Zac’s private life, the answers to which were unsettling, dangerous and, ultimately, elusive. Their labours uprooted everything they thought they knew about Zac: the son and brother they thought they had been living with turned out to be someone who wore a totally different mask out of the family abode.  

Zac disappeared unannounced from his home in Maida Vale, north London, on 28 November 2019 (p49). He was later found to have plunged to his death in the early hours of the next morning, 29 November 2019. His fall was caught only on one grainy piece of footage from the building opposite the Riverwalk apartment block, which just happened to be the headquarters of the UK Secret Intelligence Services, MI6. Zac’s death coincided with the London stabbings, later that day, of five people, including Cambridge University students Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, carried out by Usman Khan, who was shot to death by armed officers on London Bridge. The pure coincidence of timing kicked the investigation off unpropitiously: “Because this bloody debacle transpired on the day Zac disappeared, the Metropolitan Police were distracted” (p55). With the country in mourning, and the authorities’ and media attention elsewhere, albeit very close by in London, there was no media coverage of Zac’s death. Initially, Zac’s family, fearing likely intrusion from the gutter press, preferred to keep it that way. To the police it seemed ‘just another suicide’ by a troubled young man. The inauspicious and rather half-hearted way in which the police investigation was launched and unfolded becomes a constant motif of the book, as revelation after revelation about Zac’s life piles up unexplained.

To tell Zac’s story, Keefe brings to the table a range of primary sources relating to his life and sudden disappearance, assembling a detailed picture of Zac (and others’) movements in his final months and days including the vital minutes before he fell. Lots of the book is told through the recollections of Zac’s parents, Rachelle and Matthew, along with his brother Joe and wider family members, about how they went about discovering the truth of Zac’s death, when the authorities proved unwilling and/or (depending on perspective – they deny negligence or a cover-up) unable to provide convincing answers as to how he went over the Riverwalk balcony that cold winter night. In particular, Keefe recounts the steady breakdown of Rachelle and Matthew’s relationship with their son in the years preceding his death, which provides some clues as to what may have occurred in the apartment. 

Part of the cause behind the fracturing of family relationships was that Zac had become obsessed with ostentatious wealth, power and the idea of living an opulent lifestyle. During holidays from his boarding school, Zac spent increasing amounts of time out the family home, and had started blagging his way into glamorous nightclubs around Mayfair and Berkeley Square, frequented by the rich and famous. Tensions culminated in an argument Zac and his mother had about two years before he died, about material possessions and whether the Brettler family should buy a nicer car or a more impressive house. Rachelle made a snarky remark to the effect that Zac was sounding like a spoiled brat. Suddenly, “his hands were around her throat… She had grown fearful of her own child, and after that altercation she insisted that Zac see a psychiatrist” (pp32-33). So, there was a history of Zac feeling troubled and being increasingly temperamental – was it teen angst or something more? Not even the psychologists Zac saw could make much sense of it. 

Zac also claimed to be involved, out of the blue, in a series of side hustles or business deals with a variety of operators, that were bringing untold wealth to someone who, after all, was still a schoolboy in his late teens. His parents did not know what to make of Zac’s sudden foray into high-end real estate. His deals included, apparently, a finders-fee from Chelsea Football Club’s Marina Granovskaia, “the most powerful woman in football”, in her capacity as the club’s chief executive and right-hand woman to (then club owner) Roman Abramovich (p43). In response to patient questioning from Matthew, Zac showed his father an authentic-looking HSBC bank statement showing a current account balance of some £850,000. He explained that the money had come from business in oil and gas, conducted through a contact in Nigeria and Kazakhstan, ongoing real estate deals, and his involvement in a car importation scheme on which he was collaborating with an associate in Georgia. 

But was any of this true, or simply more bluster and fakery? “He’s always had this BS [bullshit] element to him” said his father (p47). Zac was an articulate, confident and persuasive young man, who could fabricate convincing stories to suit his audience. As he told a neighbour across the street, “If one thing it is that I am honest”. Yet this was the biggest lie of all. Not long before he died, looking and sounding like someone in acute distress, Zac informed his mother he was a heroin addict (p61), but, according to the autopsy report, that turned out to be a deflective ruse, like much of what Zac said to his family and others in his final months and years. Meeting a series of shady business associates in the aftermath of Zac’s death, Rachelle and Matthew were stunned to discover Zac had been using a different surname (Ismailov) and masquerading around London’s glitzy hang-outs as the estranged son of a deceased oligarch (p55) who stood to inherit a fortune. 

This revelation sets the scene for what becomes a murky deep-dive into the city’s criminal fraternity, and the dodgy deals that underpin the ostentatious wealth – rooted in dirty money – of many of its inhabitants, including the Russian oligarchs who flocked to London like wasps to jam after the introduction of New Labour’s so-called ‘golden visa’ scheme of 2008, which aimed to attract wealthy individuals from outside the EU to invest in the UK. Six years after golden visas were introduced, London Mayor Boris Johnson proclaimed, “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. We’re proud of that” (p21). Acquiring a golden visa meant foreign nationals willing to invest heavily in the local economy could effectively buy status as permanent residents. In the first seven years of the scheme, approximately 3,000 people did just that, one quarter of them arriving from Russia.

The extent of the criminality that came with this new money has to be read to be believed, although the dirty money flowed into a city that already had a filthy criminal underbelly to it. To name just two of the notorious protagonists who make an appearance in the book, Keefe does a fantastic job of putting Zac’s disappearance and death into the context of the operations of two of Verinder ‘Indian Dave’ Sharma, a notorious gangland enforcer who died a year after Zak from a drug overdose, and Akbar Shamji, who persistently stuck to his story that Zac was a troubled delusional, suicidal teenager with a drug habit. Crucially, given the Russian angle, Zac had led Sharma and Shamji to believe he was heir to a £200 million fortune. What we can establish is that the two men wanted – in fact needed – their slice of that pie and that both were with Zac on the night he died. It was Sharma’s balcony over which Zac went and Shamji had left the flat just minutes previously.

Both men, however, were slippery characters with certain ‘reputations’ and connections in high places, including in the criminal underworld. To pin them down was like nailing jelly to a wall. It was the Metropolitan Police’s job to attempt the impossible, but Zac’s parents grew steadily disheartened with how the investigators and wider authorities went about trying to solve the riddle of their son’s death. Multiple police interviews with the main suspects produced nothing concrete and, by 2021, the Crown Prosecution Service had decided no charges could be brought against any of the leading suspects, Sharma or Shamji. There was insufficient evidence to bring a charge of murder or perverting the course of justice. The coroner’s inquest of 2022 was equally inconclusive, resulting in an open verdict: Zac was deemed to have died from “multiple injuries and drowning”. As Keefe points out, the problem for those wanting answers from the coroner is that it is not their role: “an inquest is designed to establish the basic facts of a death, not who should be held liable for it” (p262).

As time ticked by, it was increasingly obvious to Rachelle and Matthew that every character in Zak’s story “was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. ‘It was three bullshit artists, selling air,’ Rachelle said” (p297). With their unease peaking around two years after Zac’s death, his parents “would ultimately conclude that at some point in the spring of 2020, just months after Zac’s death, the police had quietly stopped trying”. To try to keep momentum going, Rachelle and Matthew hired a Private Investigator to conduct an investigation of their own (p219).  Their persistence bore partial fruit, but it was only when Keefe got involved – through a chance meeting with a mutual acquaintance at a London art gallery – that some of the most intractable questions surrounding their son’s death began to be answered. Keefe’s account of his and the family’s dedicated search for the truth is, quite simply, gripping. “Page turner” gets used too liberally, but if it applies to any book it applies to this one. If you do not already know the story, avoid the reviews and online summaries and the book will be all the more fulfilling, right to the very last page.

As well as being a book about Zac’s death, this is also a study in how grief affects those closest to the victim: “Grief can function like a time machine. Life goes on: you return to work and celebrate the holidays and keep getting out of bed each day. Winter gives way to spring, one month leads to the next. But in your mind you keep getting jerked back to these specific painful moments in the past” (p205). Zac’s death is emblematic of the vagaries of human grief, particularly when someone’s death is violent and/or a troubling mystery. Dislocation and suddenly being ‘absent’ from the present are both features of traumatic, life-changing grief. Through the pages of this excellent book, which tells of a family’s dignified and quietly persistent search for the truth about the death of a much loved son and brother, the reader unfamiliar with traumatic grief will learn a lot about how it affects every part of the co-victims’ existence. Zac’s family were, fortunately, able to channel the anger and their unease about the investigation into his cause of death to gain a closure of sorts. Not every family would have been able to do this, but it shows how constructive things can emerge from the wreckage of an unexplained death. It also reveals the importance of accepting a fundamental of human existence: “You can do all the right things – and it may not be enough”.  

Image credits
1.    Main image: author’s own
2.    Zac Brettler/Riverwalk illustration: Courtesy of Chop Choppish Shop at  https://airmail.news/issues/2026-4-4/londons-lost-boy
3.    Author’s own. 
4.    Author’s own.