London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth” by Patrick Radden KeefeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Author Debby Waldman recommended London Falling, and as she predicted, I hoovered it up. It is based on the real mystery surrounding the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who came from an upper-middle class London family but yearned to be super-rich. Taking the “fake it till you make it” approach to life, he wormed his way into the upper echelons of London finance and real estate, pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. Unfortunately for Zac, Russian oligarchs have a nasty habit of falling to their deaths, and that is how Zac’s short life ended. This is not a spoiler: we know from the start that he died. The mystery is, was it suicide or was he murdered? And if the latter, by whom?
I kept thinking of the show Succession and the real-life American oligarch sagas we’ve been watching since Trump retook power. You can’t feel sorry for anyone Zac conned with his cover story: they all turn out to be slimy people despite their great grooming and manners. Nevertheless, it is distressing to see how much criminality and corruption there really is in countries you’d think would have better policing and governance. I worked on Canada’s Parliament Hill in the early 1980s, and sure there was some corruption then, but it generally got exposed and the relevant officials resigned. I can’t help wondering if it is really that much worse now in Western democracies, or if I was simply naïve. Although I did sit in on some insider meetings and later became a lobbyist (or, as we called it, a “public affairs” specialist), I certainly wasn’t in the inner-inner-circles.
The book is also a moving exploration of the impact of Zac’s actions and the manner of his death on his parents. It’s hard not to feel empathy for them. They thought they’d raised a kid with good morals and were left wondering where they’d gone wrong. Sadly, they were also left seriously disillusioned with a system that they – like me as a naïve young Parliamentary Intern – had believed was less corrupt.
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