London Falling

Listen on Audible for free
Try for 30 days, you can cancel whenever you want

On a November night in 2019, a nineteen year old fell from the balcony of a riverside flat in Millbank and died on the Thames foreshore. The police leaned towards suicide. His parents could not accept that. Then they began to learn who their son had been pretending to be, and the case stopped looking like a private tragedy and started looking like a crime.

Zac Brettler grew up in a comfortable north London family. In the last year of his life he was moving through a very different London as Zac Ismailov, the supposed son of a Russian oligarch with a fortune waiting for him. The men he impressed with that story were not the kind of people you want to disappoint. London Falling follows Rachelle and Matthew Brettler as they push against an investigation that kept stalling, and it asks how a boy with a fantasy ended up in a flat with men who had every reason to lie about what happened there.

This is true crime without a tidy ending. Nobody has been convicted. The inquest returned an open verdict. What the book offers instead is a patient, forensic account of a city where dirty money buys silence, and of two parents who refused to be quiet.

A grieving family as the investigators

The spine of the book is the Brettlers themselves. They trawled their son's phone, chased down the people he had been with and fed leads to a police team that often seemed a step behind them. Two names keep returning. Akbar Shamji, a businessman who had taken Zac under his wing, gave shifting accounts of the night. Verinder Sharma, the flat's tenant and a career criminal known as Indian Dave, answered questions with no comment.

Around those two men the author builds a wider picture: offshore property, old school gangsters reinvented as consultants, a young man who worked out early that the right accent and the right story would open doors. The reporting is dense but never dry. It reads like a thriller because the questions are real and the answers keep slipping away.

Why the audio is the version to get

The audiobook, published by Picador, is read by the author, and that matters here more than usual. Patrick Radden Keefe is not a stage actor and does not try to be. He reads the way he writes, calm and exact, letting the facts carry the weight. Passages about the parents are handled with care rather than melodrama, and listeners on Goodreads have singled out the empathy that comes through in his own voice.

There is also the benefit of hearing the investigator tell you what he found. When he weighs an alibi or points out a gap in the police file, you hear his judgement in real time. The pacing suits a long walk or a commute. At around thirteen hours it is a substantial listen, but the chapters are short and the story has a pull that makes the length feel earned.

What the critics said

The reviews have been largely admiring, with one real debate. Ian Thomson in the Guardian called it grimly absorbing from start to finish, a window on to financial dirty work and Walter Mitty fantasies of wealth. James Walton in the Telegraph found it rigorous and thoughtful. Mark O'Connell, writing in the New York Review of Books, described it as infernally gripping. It went straight to the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list and has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

The dissent is about distance. Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times felt the book hews too closely to the parents' point of view and is reluctant to push on harder questions about the family. Philip Hensher in the Spectator went further and thought the story too thin for its length. That is a fair thing to know going in. The Brettlers were the author's main source, and the book is openly on their side. Whether that is a weakness or simply honesty about where the evidence sits is something listeners can decide for themselves.

The reporter behind it

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and one of the most decorated non fiction writers of his generation. Say Nothing, about a disappearance during the Troubles, won the Orwell Prize and became an acclaimed television drama. Empire of Pain, his history of the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2021. He is known for taking a single death or a single family and using it to open up a whole system.

London Falling began as a long New Yorker article in 2024 that drew worldwide attention to the case. The book expands that piece with far more on the people around Zac and on how organised crime in Britain has changed. If you have enjoyed his earlier work, this is the same method applied to the city on your doorstep. If you have not, it is a good place to start, and the Audible free trial covers it.

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.