In November 2019, in London, among the most surveilled cities in the world, a security camera captured a young man in a luxury high-rise on the banks of the Thames. It watched as he stepped out into the balcony in the middle of the night, walked from end to end before returning to the centre, and then pitched himself over, into nothingness, into the river. It was a matter of minutes, possibly seconds. But what led to those seconds? And what followed after?

Beyond the headlines

In the hands of seven different novelists, the story could move in seven different directions. None of them would be wrong, but none would be correct either. The willing suspension of disbelief — that unstated, ever-present compact between the reader and the novelist — would possibly ensure satisfaction, even closure: the kind achieved after a particularly good crime thriller.

In the hands of Patrick Radden Keefe, staff writer at The New Yorker and master of the art of narrative nonfiction, however, the narrative produces a range of takeaways: horror, fear, and caution, but also awe and wonder, respect, and understanding. If fiction takes one into places unventured and lives never lived, great narrative non-fiction, such as Keefe’s, takes the reader deeper into the familiar, beyond the headlines. It connects dots and builds sequences riding on the fundamentals of good journalism: relentless reportage, endless time for the principals — for these are real people, not figments of the imagination — and the ability to sift through both and cohere the material into a gripping read reflective of reality.

Keefe’s focus in London Falling is, first and foremost, the corrupted city. After multiple metamorphoses through history, London, at the cusp of the new millennium, reinvented itself — as Oliver Bullough brilliantly described in Butler to the World (2022) — as the capital of a nation that is “servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals”.

Zac’s world

Already a magnet for freshly minted oligarchs after the break-up of the USSR, London saw another influx in 2000 when Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, assumed power in Russia. The same year, Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, a young, well-off city couple, gave birth to their second son, Zac. From early on, he demonstrated that he was funny, charismatic, and wildly intelligent, and perhaps also something of a fabulist. As Zac grew into adolescence, it became clear that his parents’ world was not enough for him. When he changed schools as a teen, joining Mill Hill, “a particularly attractive option to the children of foreign plutocrats”, he started introducing himself as the son of an exiled Russian/Kazakh millionaire.

In 2019, a casually cultivated acquaintance associated with the Chelsea Football Club (then owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich) patched Zac through to Ugandan-Indian Akbar Shamji, a debonair man with an aura of wealth and success, and Verinder Sharma, a “rubber tycoon”. At last, Zac seemed to have acquired a toehold in the world of the rich, famous and Insta-glamourous. Together, the three of them would strike deals — in real estate, oil, perhaps even drugs — and grow richer still. Shamji and Sharma were also the last people Zac saw ahead of his fatal fall.

Towards the end of the book, after going down every rabbit hole, chasing every lead, Keefe summarises the story in a few lines. (Spoiler ahead.) A young man with ambition, talent, and a self-proclaimed fortune had cosied up with two older men — shadier, more experienced, and far more desperate. Zac was naïve and inexperienced at 19, while the other two were nearing the end of their dubious careers, primed for one last big gamble. But who conned whom, and who paid the price?

The art of storytelling

As fascinating as that puzzle is, Keefe’s real triumph lies in weaving the complex web that enables the relationship, starting with Zac’s parents and their back stories, then delving into Shamji’s father’s flashy, unsubstantial businesses, and also touching on Sharma’s early years in an immigrant Indian family. Through it all, London shape-shifts — loosening its economic regulations, losing its moral moorings, and becoming a city of the 21st century.

A few things went Keefe’s way when he stumbled on the story in 2023: he had unlimited access to the Brettlers and their contemporaneous notes on the ordeal, including long conversations with the inexplicably underperforming Metropolitan Police. Intense research revealed Shamji’s colourful, carefully elided past. And he was able to piece together enough of Sharma’s arc to introduce the element of danger and violence that defined Zac’s brief life.

The success of London Falling is entirely down to Keefe’s exceptional storytelling skills and his immense empathy which, somehow, never veers into either judgment or absolution. He seems to suggest that Zac’s story belongs to all of us: to parents, siblings, friends, mentors, role models, institutions, and nation. Why, then, do we let him down again and again?

London Falling

Patrick Radden Keefe

Picador

₹750

The reviewer is a writer based in Bengaluru.

Published - July 31, 2026 06:35 am IST