Booksology For London the 2010s was a brilliant (in the British sense of the word) decade, as it grabbed the gold ring of international finance. Gleaming towers — the Shard, the Leadenhall — shot up; crime rates dropped. Cultural exports such as “Downton Abbey” and Coldplay ushered in a wave of Anglophilia, punctuated by the 2012 Olympic games, which opened on a cheeky note: actor Daniel Craig as James Bond, the MI6 agent, accompanied a stunt double for Queen Elizabeth in a helicopter, both parachuting into a stadium while crowds cheered.
MI6 and another iconic venue, Wembley Stadium, play minor roles in Patrick Radden Keefe’s “London Falling,” a propulsive true-crime story and surgical critique of the city’s glamorous façade and dark underbelly. In the early morning of November 29, 2019, a security camera at MI6 headquarters captured a figure leaping from a fifth-floor balcony across the Thames River, close to Vauxhall Bridge. The luxury apartment building, the Riverwalk, seemed tailored for a global capital. Hours later the victim, Zac Brettler, nineteen years old, washed ashore, skull bashed. He’d been raised in a reputable Jewish family in affluent Maida Vale. (His maternal grandfather, Hugo Gryn, was a Holocaust survivor and eminent rabbi whose secrets Keefe reveals near the end of the book.) His parents, Rachelle, a freelance writer, and Matthew, a banker, vowed to find out what had happened to their boy, pushing against COVID restrictions, a sluggish Metropolitan Police investigation, and a pair of middle-aged men who knew more than they were willing to divulge.
Ever a deft stylist, Keefe — a New Yorker staff writer whose previous books dug into the troubles in Northern Ireland and the Sackler pharmaceutical family — bobs and weaves amid timelines as he bores deep into his characters’ histories. Zac was quick-witted and charming if impulsive, bouncing between private schools, obsessed with the trappings of money: sports cars, fancy restaurants, posh neighborhoods like Mayfair and St. John’s Wood. By 2018 he’d crafted a persona: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch, poised to inherit tens of millions of pounds. Unbeknownst to his parents, Zac had joined up with Akbar Shamji, a sketchy entrepreneur living beyond his means, and Shamji’s thuggish associate, Verinder Sharma, famous on the street as “Indian Dave.” Zac glommed onto Akbar in particular: he’d ride along in his mentor’s Mercedes and walk his prized Weimaraner.
“London Falling”’s flashbacks extend to World War II and span continents. Akbar’s father, a Muslim immigrant expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda, amassed a fortune in his adopted nation: he hobnobbed with Margaret Thatcher and purchased Wembley Stadium. Indian Dave, also an immigrant, here serves as a window onto the city’s underworld, where we meet a rogue cast straight out of a Guy Ritchie film: “McAvoy was royalty: the unrepentant architect of one of the greatest heists in British history. ‘Mickey McAvoy is a very well-respected man,’ one English murderer who knew him in Spain declared.”
Keefe’s tone is often deadpan, with echoes of Capote and Didion as he builds suspense. His reporting is broad and agile, his prose sharp-edged, the narrative leaner than in his acclaimed “Empire of Pain” and “Say Nothing.” He keeps our focus on the foreground — a minute-by-minute account of Zac’s final night in the Riverwalk apartment, his entanglements with Akbar and Indian Dave, possible torture — tweaking the story just beyond the rim of sight. After Zac’s death, Akbar and Verinder volunteered their assistance, eager to help until the investigation implicated them, cogs in a “clandestine economy.” Keefe has written a morality tale for an amoral age while entertaining us with shootouts, robberies, heroin deals, and an enigmatic puzzle. His journalism is rooted in our obligations to each other, old-fashioned Eagle Scout citizenship, at a moment when might makes right and obscene wealth overwhelms our institutions. Zac, Akbar, and Verinder were each “pretending to be something he wasn’t . . . caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.”
Yet in a book about concealed (occasionally half-concealed) agendas, it’s fitting that Keefe has an agenda of his own. When the Met’s “maddeningly incurious” detective stonewalls the Brettlers’ queries, the author becomes their sleuth, molding his research around the couple’s grief and decency. Akbar may be the villain, but Keefe takes an unnecessary pot shot at his son’s modeling career, comparing Akbar Jr.’s pose in a Dolce & Gabbana ad to “a midcentury Sicilian pimp.” (Akbar Jr. had nothing to do with the case.) Zac remains a cipher, banished to the sidelines. Despite red flags everywhere, Keefe is reluctant to consider the teenager’s fraught mental health; he prefers a golden-boy-ensnared-by-the-wrong-crowd approach. He shrugs off Zac’s deceptions as a kind of precocious child’s play, rationalized and dismissed, like Rabbi Gryn’s harmful lies. At one point the author blames the tragedy on social-media algorithms, although online young people rarely create personas that endanger their lives. Why not probe Zac’s sociopathic tendencies? Was Keefe co-opted by his friendship with the Brettlers? “London Falling” treads the fine line journalists walk when they bring biases to their reportage. I wonder what the late Janet Malcolm would have made of this book.
Ethics are a human invention; and like all inventions they can degrade in value, even fall apart. The same goes for cities and their guardians. As Keefe observes of the Met: “The very fact that some of their inquiries remained inconclusive seemed itself to speak to the malign power of the metropolis — the empty mansions, the offshore accounts, the tainted riches, the anonymous shell companies, the amoral businessmen, the predatory thugs, the incompetent authorities, the grandeur of all those dazzling surfaces obscuring a netherworld of shadow.”
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”
LONDON FALLING: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday, 384 pages, $35
