{"id":1098455,"date":"2026-07-19T09:19:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T09:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1098455\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T09:19:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T09:19:18","slug":"review-of-london-falling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1098455\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of London Falling"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November 2019, a London<\/a> teenager named Zac Brettler plunged from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, an expensive luxury apartment building along the north bank of the Thames River. After weeks of speculation and mystery surrounding his death, closed-circuit television <\/a>footage from the nearby headquarters of MI6, Britain\u2019s foreign intelligence service, would reveal that he had jumped. But why? This question preoccupies\u00a0London Falling, a masterly if eccentric and at times frustrating work of investigative journalism by the\u00a0New Yorker\u2019s Patrick Radden Keefe.<\/p>\n

London Falling\u00a0captures a particular moment in Britain that amounts to a nervous holding pattern. In an epoch wedged between the collapse of the Soviet Union<\/a> and the COVID-19 pandemic, a seemingly endless\u00a0stream\u00a0of money\u00a0flows\u00a0into London\u2019s real estate<\/a> market, sports industry, and hospitality scene.\u00a0Meanwhile,\u00a0manufacturing and industry fade into irrelevance.<\/p>\n

This is a beautiful portrait of a rather sad era. Deprived of its old manufacturing and maritime industries, the island nation had reinvented itself as a service economy. Britain\u2019s competitive advantage in absorbing vast quantities of new money from the world\u2019s less stable regions, such as the former USSR, Africa, and the Middle East<\/a>,\u00a0is doing so\u00a0while asking few, if any, questions.<\/p>\n

Born in 2000, Zac Brettler is a restless kid whose upper-middle-class life is not enough for him. Surrounded by rich Russians at a succession of private schools, he begins to develop a taste for their flashy lifestyle. The Brettlers are not poor. They reside in Maida Vale, a respectably affluent area, and the family has a second apartment in New York<\/a>, although they drive a Mazda. They are Jewish. Both grandfathers relocated to Britain from continental Europe<\/a>, one before World War II<\/a>, and the other after, having survived the Holocaust<\/a>. Growing up, Zac was particularly impressed with movies such as War Dogs,\u00a0The Wolf of Wall Street, and\u00a0Eastern Promises, the last of which depicts a network of Russian criminals in London. As he grows older, Zac develops into a pathological liar, obsessed with money and status,\u00a0and constantly trying to manipulate those around him.<\/p>\n

\"LondonLondon Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family\u2019s Search for Truth; By Patrick Radden Keefe; Doubleday; 384 pp.; $35.00<\/p>\n

Why Keefe chose this exact story to represent the zeitgeist is something to ponder. He is not the first author to run with the \u201cLondongrad\u201d storyline, and there are countless examples of intrigue involving the London underworld, Russians, and the British state that symbolize the slow erosion of Britain. Keefe\u2019s\u00a0skill as a writer keeps the reader invested in his narrative,\u00a0but he mentions numerous stories in passing that sound more compelling than this one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the tale intrigues,\u00a0even while\u00a0Keefe fails to make his reader fall in love with this cast of characters, who regularly come off as boring, vaguely annoying, and often quite\u00a0foolish. Zac, who posed as an oligarch\u2019s son, could\u00a0not\u00a0even speak Russian. Not to mention his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, who Keefe\u00a0depicts very charitably. Their true family dynamics do not seem adequately explained, perhaps due to Keefe\u2019s apparent closeness with the Brettlers. He more or less absolves them of any responsibility for\u00a0allowing their deluded child to sink ever deeper into the company of dangerous men. These men are Akbar Shamji, an alleged con man and serial entrepreneur who arrived in Britain after Idi Amin\u2019s 1972 expulsion of Uganda\u2019s Indian population, and Verinder Sharma, known as \u201cIndian Dave,\u201d a gangster and suspected murderer who had his heyday in the violent underworld of the 1990s and early 2000s. These are definitely not the A-team, as far as murky\u00a0Londoners\u00a0are concerned.<\/p>\n

Zac\u2019s relationship with Sharma was based around an elaborate lie that had Zac as an outcast son of a Russian billionaire and Sharma as a mentor-like father figure. In fact,\u00a0Sharma\u2019s\u00a0intentions were to extract a significant fortune from\u00a0Zac, which had never existed. Apparently, Zac was able to convey the illusion of enormous wealth by burning through his\u00a0\u00a320,000 savings account.\u00a0Zac\u2019s fatal plunge from Sharma\u2019s Riverwalk balcony may have been an attempt to flee the criminal\u2019s vengeance. As we learn in one passage, a\u00a0former\u00a0underworld\u00a0associate of Sharma\u2019s relayed to Keefe (after menacingly name-dropping all of Keefe\u2019s immediate family members) that, knowing Indian Dave, \u201cit would have been logical for the boy to assume that he was not going to make it out of that flat alive.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

What irritates most about this book<\/a> is Keefe\u2019s choice of this particular story to reveal the unfortunate truths of London\u2019s decline. The simple fact is, Zac Brettler was not even a particularly good\u00a0conman. He never actually delivered on his grandiosity.\u00a0He\u00a0was never reined in or disciplined by an authority figure and was allowed to get himself into serious trouble. But smarter people would have never fallen for his schemes. Anyone could have called his bluff with a number of relatively simple tests, such as requesting to see a form of legal identification, asking him to make a purchase worthy of a billionaire, or pairing him up with an actual Russian speaker. That an amateur like Zac, an aging thug (Sharma), and a flaky con man (Shamji) found each other\u2019s company speaks to the low quality of their respective operations.\u00a0London Falling\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0quite\u00a0make it clear why one should\u00a0take such great interest in\u00a0any of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The thing that readers should care about is the declining state capacity of Britain, a place long synonymous with the highest standards of civil administration and an unwavering rule of law. The police who investigate Zac\u2019s death are laughably incompetent. For one, they fail to take a sample of the dried blood found in Sharma\u2019s apartment. They also fail to hold Shamji accountable for an astonishing and deeply suspicious series of lies that he told them throughout the investigation.\u00a0Ultimately, the smoking gun of this story remains elusive.<\/p>\n

ONWARD, STALINIST SOLDIERS<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In this account, the surveillance state looms very large.\u00a0But\u00a0an investigative body that is able to download the entire contents of suspects\u2019 phones, geolocate their vehicles, produce vast quantities of footage, and uncover Zac\u2019s old search history is unable to actually do anything with that material. Lying to the police is not a crime<\/a> in England, we are told. Apparently, it is not even a cause for further investigation. Some of the scant closure that emerges from the case is delivered via public inquest, a bureaucratic procedure in which unknown or suspicious deaths are discussed in an open hearing. At the inquest for Zac\u2019s death, Shamji is pressed to explain the inconsistencies in his narrative.\u00a0A\u00a0woman presiding over the\u00a0inquest\u00a0repeatedly obstructs the Brettlers\u2019 attorney from asking further questions about the death of their teenage son.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this tale of arrivistes, thugs, and nasty, incompetent bureaucrats, Keefe seems to be dancing around a larger revelation about why Western, and particularly Anglosphere, societies are in such steep cultural decline.\u00a0This is a mere glimpse into the soul of London and the lives of the true oligarchs who reside there. But\u00a0whatever the merits of the book, one lesson is clear: A story like this would not be possible in a healthy city, a healthy nation, a healthy civilization.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Carson Becker is an American writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In November 2019, a London teenager named Zac Brettler plunged from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, an expensive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1098456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7757],"tags":[17976,3444,748,188,393,4884,2817,24393,257,299841,16,15],"class_list":["post-1098455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-book-reviews","tag-books","tag-britain","tag-crime","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-intelligence","tag-investigations","tag-london","tag-magazine-life-arts","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116945904509785687","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1098456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}