One of the most frustrating experiences for a journalist is when a story turns out to be less than it seemed. A rise in deaths has a banal statistical explanation, a juicy tale is an exaggerated rumor, a source turns out to be more boastful than accurate.

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Say Nothing shot him into the rare position of a celebrity journalist, is a very fine writer and reporter, and so he has made a highly readable book out of material that was, I suspect, not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (expanded from a 2024 New Yorkerpiece), begins with a teenager’s mysterious death that seems connected to a world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and more intimate than the mystery first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

One of the most frustrating experiences for a journalist is when a story turns out to be less than it seemed. A rise in deaths has a banal statistical explanation, a juicy tale is an exaggerated rumor, a source turns out to be more boastful than accurate.

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Say Nothing shot him into the rare position of a celebrity journalist, is a very fine writer and reporter, and so he has made a highly readable book out of material that was, I suspect, not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (expanded from a 2024 New Yorkerpiece), begins with a teenager’s mysterious death that seems connected to a world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and more intimate than the mystery first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, jumped to his death from the fifth floor of Riverwalk, a glitzy apartment building overlooking the Thames. In one of the story’s many coincidences, his leap was caught by a surveillance camera on the building across the water, the headquarters of MI6, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the CIA.

The circumstances of Brettler’s death were immediately suspicious. The 19-year-old had gotten caught up with two older men: the then-47-year-old Akbar Shamji and the 50-something Verinder Sharma, both of whom had been in the apartment he leapt from that night. He had told his parents he was wheeling and dealing in the world of the London rich, striking deals with Russian oligarchs to buy apartments and investing in mining projects in Kazakhstan. Shamji said he knew Brettler as “Zac Ismailov,” a young man who claimed to be the disinherited son of a Russian billionaire.

London is infamously full of dirty money, and Keefe elegantly describes the world of the Russian rich, who discovered after the Cold War that British authorities were only too happy to help them move their stolen wealth into the West. The United Kingdom is a reasonably clean country itself, but London’s professionals—bankers, lawyers, brokers, real estate agents—grew fat off money plundered from corruption elsewhere. London provided convenient fictions such as “non-domiciled,” which allowed foreigners to live there without taking on tax obligations; a legal system that aggressively favored libel tourism for people eager to stamp out investigations into their wealth; and plenty of opportunities to spend in style. The British police may even have turned a blind eye to Russian-linked murders in the 2010s in order to keep the good times rolling.

But Brettler’s death was a case of mutual delusion and petty crime, not international intrigue. An indifferent student, Brettler had ended up at a London private school with an unchallenging entrance policy for the children of the rich. His own family were upper-class Jewish Londoners (a father in finance, a mother in journalism); extremely well off but hardly at the same level as some of his classmates, a number of whom were the kids of Russian oligarchs.

Brettler became a serial fantasist, claiming sexual, social, and financial successes far beyond reality. His peers were more skeptical of his claims than some adults—even his parents, who clearly hoped that their child had stumbled onto early success and believed a faked screenshot where he purported to have £850,000 in the bank.

In reality, he was burning through an inheritance of roughly £18,000, “paying for Ubers and picking up the tab just often enough to seem credible,” and perhaps doing a little low-level drug dealing to his peers. By the time he died, there was just £4 left in his account. His claims of connections to money and power were magpie fantasies, assembled from small scraps of truth and nodding acquaintances.

If Brettler had been just a little luckier, all this would have amounted to an embarrassing period to be glossed over or joked about in adulthood. Instead, it brought him into the orbit of Shamji and Sharma, two men with their own histories of boastful lies and fantasies of wealth.

Shamji was, as the British say, a chancer: somewhere in that murky zone that includes both entrepreneurs and con artists. Sharma was a straightforward crook, a jumped-up thug known as Indian Dave. They seem to have believed Brettler’s claims of wealth—and then to have gotten angry when he didn’t cough up promised cash. When apparently threatened with violence, Brettler appears to have tried to get away with a foolhardy leap into the river, only to strike his hip on the way down, turning a dangerous fall into a fatal one.

As a result, the book gradually transforms from a thriller into an exploration of the loss of a child. Keefe became close to Brettler’s parents, who struggle through the process of unravelling their son’s fantasies and a police force largely uninterested in digging deeper into the case. Sharma died by apparent suicide in December 2020, but the Brettler family couldn’t obtain the details of his death for years and began to wonder if it was being covered up as part of some bigger scheme. They wanted, understandably, their child’s death to have meaning, rather than to just be, as his mother eventually realizes, “three bullshit artists, selling air.”

Parental grief is always moving, even if it’s for an unsympathetic child. Perhaps Zac would have grown into a better person; many people do. As it is, he seems like a boy handed the world on a plate—loving parents, plenty of money, plenty of education—who decided that he deserved more. At one point he attempts to strangle his mother in a fit of rage, apparently angry at his parents for not being rich enough.

Where the book falls short is in the attempt to make this tragedy say something about London itself. The material about London’s role as “butler to the world,” as Oliver Bullough put it in his 2022 book, almost feels as though it’s left over from an early draft of the story, before the mundane truth of Brettler’s lies was revealed.

Brettler, Sharma, and Shamji were all blowhards trying to imitate the wealth around them, but this is hardly a phenomenon limited to London. The world is full of sad men of all ages trapped in dreams of a lifestyle they can’t have, especially in the age of online influencers.

Keefe goes briefly into Brettler’s online life, but only toward the end of the book—and these parts are based largely on the dead boy’s web searches, not his app usage, which, by 2019, was the main way any thoughtless 19-year-old interacted with the internet. Thanks to TikTok and YouTube, millions of teenage boys have convinced themselves that they, too, should be driving Maseratis and living in multi-million-dollar apartments.

It’s another city altogether that looms over these delusions: Dubai, not London, is the global center of bullshitters who aim at feeding the resentful fantasies of young men. Even more than the British capital, it provides superficial glamor and an easy home for global money, as well as an exploitable underclass of servants to support those fantasies. Many of these influencers are just as fraudulent as Sharma and Shamji, living six to a room in Dubai and renting cars for the day. It’s telling that when Brettler imagined another life for himself, he claimed his mother was living in Dubai, not London.

There is another kind of London story in this book, though—one of previous generations and their arrival, success, and pain in the capital. Keefe charts the histories of Shamji’s father, Abdul, and Brettler’s grandfather, the beloved rabbi and media presenter Hugo Gryn. Both men came to London as refugees from traumatic circumstances abroad: Gryn was a teenage Auschwitz survivor, Abdul Shamji one of Uganda’s most successful businessmen before Idi Amin expelled the Asian community. (Abdul Shamji was more cushioned than most of Uganda’s Asians, who left with little but their suitcases, managing to get over $1 million out of the country via Swiss bank accounts.)

In England, both men made public careers for themselves—but also told stories and lies. Gryn maintained a secret second family. Shamji became a successful entrepreneur and friend of Margaret Thatcher, only to have his empire collapse in scandal. The connection between Abdul Shamji’s lies and his son’s world of bullshit is much clearer than between Gryn, who died before his grandson was born, and Brettler.

But those stories of reinvention, illusion, and generational trauma offer a reminder that London’s openness to the world has meant refuge for people, not just money. The vast majority of the immigrants who still flock to the city are not oligarchs or con men, but people looking for a chance at the decent, hard-working life for themselves or their children that Brettler turned away from.