In September, 2015, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote about Ken Dornstein, whose older brother David had perished in Pan Am Flight 103 which had exploded mid-air, six miles above the earth. The debris fell over Lockerbie, Scotland. Over many decades, Ken kept trying to solve the murder mystery of his brother’s death. Who was responsible?

If a writer’s career is a sum of its parts, then all of Patrick Radden Keefe’s career has led to London Falling, his most recent non-fiction book. Ostensibly about the death of a teenager, Zac Brettler, in 2019, the book is a matryoshka doll of stories with charming rogues, liars, criminals and various nefarious types. At the heart of the tale, the centre of it is the grief and bewilderment of Zac Brettler’s parents, both children of Holocaust survivors, thoroughly decent folks who realise that their teenage son, while alive, was a fabulist of the highest order. Zac went around lying to everyone about his family and wealth. Using the name Zac Ismailov, he claimed to have been the son of a Russian oligarch.

Keefe enters the investigation into Zac Brettler at a late stage. Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle had already attempted to probe the death of their son after realising that the Metropolitan Police in London were not keen on pursuing some of the threads for opaque reasons. The well-to-do couple, elite in their mooring, would soon discover just how shady a metropolis like London is in its setting.

Three bullshit artists selling air

In some ways, the setting of the tragedy is something out of a Raymond Chandler novel – three men in a riverfront London flat, only two make it out alive. The one who dies is a boy of 19 with a mere four pounds in his bank account at the end of his life. The other two, Akbar Shamji, a self-proclaimed successful businessman with a string of unsuccessful ventures and bad debts, and Verinder Sharma, a proper thug, deepen this mystery.

How did a teenager with a possibly bright future and loving and wealthy family find himself in these circumstances with these characters?

As we read in the book, things go wrong very quickly in young Brettler’s life. The narrative comes alive with propulsive tension when Keefe shifts the focus to Verinder Sharma / Justin Patel / Indian Dave / Little Fella to provide the reader with a sense of his alleged criminal past. Seemingly, there are very few illegal activities that did not interest Indian Dave and his associates, who are named “Muscles” and Tyson. (This, however, does not stop him from having two families with two different women both named Tara.)

After committing a violent crime, Indian Dave disappears, only to reappear years later and somehow cross paths with Zac Brettler / Zac Ismailov and develop a murky kinship. Sharma dies a year after the death of the young Brettler, deepening the intrigue and depriving the Brettler family of the possibility of getting a clear explanation of Zac’s death.

Fifty per cent of four pounds

The book is about the pull and push of time, along with the remaking of time. It is also about the way parenting is doomed. The mistake, it seems, is that parents try to mould the children after their own best selves, but, unknown to them, some of these children come fully-formed.

As much as the book is about parental love, it is also about the narrating of stories: the ones London needs to tell about its past and the present, the ones that the parents of a dead 19-year-old tell to stay alive, and the ones empathetic writers like Keefe are able to weave from an unsolved death mystery.

The fact that Zac had lied about being the son of a Russian billionaire had drawn both Verinder and Shamji to him. They saw Zac as manna for their business failures, an easy target, perhaps. Zac’s well-to-do parents had, on his 18th birthday, given him a large enough sum of money – which is what proved to be a costly mistake. The book is set in a universe where grown-ups actively believe that a teenager could be in possession of 205 million pounds, and then try to grab a part of the phantom wealth.

Just as there is no word for terrible things happening to decent people, there is no word that describes the pain of parents outliving their young son (though the Sanskrit word vilomah comes close). One of the most harrowing scenes in the book is set during the public inquest of Zac Brettler’s death. The proceedings fail to provide the clear answers so desperately sought by the parents, and devolve into a weird farce when Akbar Shamji appears to be in the shower with his camera turned on while the inquest proceedings are going on!

Keefe begins London Falling with an epigraph by the British-Nigerian poet and editor Gboyega Odubanjo, who went missing and was later discovered to have accidentally drowned in a lake in 2023. He was 27. In his poem, “Rewilding”, the poet wrote, “but it rained so there was rain and because the people had forgotten the river had to retell its story. it said before anything there was water and there was water. on one side you. on the other side you. the people mistook this for a riddle. each claiming a side for themselves. the river welcoming the people in their entirety. taking in them the clothes on their backs all that they clung to.”

Grief, the spirit of this tale, is not a way forward, or a morass. It comes alive and throbs as a lesion which grows just under the skin of the host, be it loving parents, a brother, schoolmates, a city at odds with itself, or an investigative journalist on top of his craft.

*Sangeeta Chakravorty is a Mumbai–based writer and lawyer. She is a recent graduate of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC. *

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe, Picador.

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