London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

About the book

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river. In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead. In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice. In a bravura f

Description: publisher’s blurb via Hardcover

Where the score comes from

The sources average 8.5 across 82 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 31% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 7.9 comes out.

Reader voices

The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).

• “Another fantastic read from Patrick Radden Keefe. Though I'm not a huge fan of true crime, this felt thoroughly researched rather than sensationalised, setting the tales of billionaires and dirty money against a very intimate family portrait. Despite still being very binge-able, I would say this is weaker than Say Nothing or Empire of Pain. Some of the threads felt like dead ends, lacking the payoff, and others were meandering too far from the central thread. It's also written from Zac's parents' perspective which is fine but a little limiting, as none of their own actions get the same scru…”

  ★ 4/5churie on Hardcover

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