London Falling

On the night of November 29, 2019, security cameras at MI6 headquarters in London recorded a young man pacing a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower beside the Thames. At 2:24 a.m. he jumped into the river. Several miles away, Rachelle Brettler had been expecting her son Zac home after a weekend with a friend. When he failed to return, two police officers came to her door with the news that he was dead.

Zac, who was nineteen, had struggled at times, but nothing about him suggested suicide. As Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, tried to make sense of their loss, they found out how little they had known of his life. He had been presenting himself as Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch and heir to an enormous fortune. In that role he had become tangled up with Akbar Shamji, an elusive London businessman, and with a violent gangster called Indian Dave.

The Brettlers began their own inquiry and found themselves in a harsher, more dangerous London than the one they thought they lived in. They came to believe that something far worse than suicide had killed their son, yet Scotland Yard seemed unable, or unwilling, to hold anyone to account.

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, follows the family's search and strips back the gloss of a city of grand mansions and exclusive nightclubs, where nearly everything can be bought and fantasies of wealth are funded by dirty money and corruption. The result is a suspenseful investigation full of startling turns, and also a tender look at parental love and the difficulty of raising children today, as a family tries to learn not only how their son died but who he really was.