Even the most talented mystery writer would have a hard time inventing a story more bizarre than the true one that Patrick Radden Keefe reveals in LONDON FALLING. On the surface, it's an investigation into a mysterious death in the city of London in 2019. But with the skill and depth of insight he displayed in SAY NOTHING, the complex story of an abduction and murder in 1970s Northern Ireland, Keefe painstakingly scrapes away the glittering facade of England's capital in the early 21st century to expose the symbiotic relationship between the great wealth accumulated there and an underworld of corruption and violence.

At 2:24 a.m. on Friday, November 29, 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler plunged from the balcony of Apartment 504 in the London building known as Riverwalk to his death on the bank of the River Thames. His fall was captured by a video camera located across the river at the headquarters of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, and his body was discovered later that morning by a man walking to work.

From the moment they learned of Zac's death, his parents, Matthew and Rachelle --- he a successful specialist in the field of structured finance and she a freelance journalist --- were skeptical that their son died by suicide, as the Metropolitan Police ultimately concluded after more than two years of investigation. Unfortunately for the Brettlers, the authorities' slipshod detective work may have eliminated any hope of assigning criminal responsibility for Zac's death. Indeed, their own intensive personal effort to unearth the truth "had exposed, at least partially, a matrix of power and secrecy and corruption in contemporary London, a dimension of their own city that they had never recognized before now." A chance meeting in 2023 led to their introduction to Keefe and their decision to finally go public with their story.

"Driven by a deep empathy for the suffering of Zac's family, peopled with an intriguing and often colorful cast of characters, and written with an unassuming grace, [LONDON FALLING is] a model of books in its genre."

The son Matthew and Rachelle had raised possessed a gregarious and charismatic personality, and despite a comfortable upbringing, he was driven by a powerful desire for material possessions. That impulse fit quite comfortably with the prevailing ethos of London in the second decade of the century. While his parents also were familiar with his tendency to stretch the truth, after his death they were astonished to discover that he'd been leading a complex double life, passing himself off to potential business associates as Zac Ismailov, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.

In a decision that may have ended up costing him his life, Zac entered the circle of Akbar Shamji, an apparently well-to-do businessman whose family reconstituted its fortune after being expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 along with the country's entire Asian population. One of his other principal companions was Verinder Sharma, known on the street as Indian Dave, a "carnivore in London's criminal ecosystem," whose activities focused on extortion and debt collection through violence. On the evening of his death, Zac spent time in the company of both men, and he jumped into the river from the balcony of Sharma's apartment.

Though Zac's tragic story anchors LONDON FALLING, it would be impossible to understand it without some grasp of life in what Keefe describes as the "glitzy, mercenary, aspirational culture of modern London" that was born near the end of the 20th century. That culture shift was triggered by the Big Bang --- the nickname for the British government's deregulation of the banking industry in 1986 --- that encouraged financial services firms from around the world to descend on the British capital. It accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 when Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich, who purchased the Chelsea football club, led the way for the world's plutocrats to stash much of their wealth in a country where they would pay no taxes if they could prove they were domiciled elsewhere. Keefe writes that all of these forces combined to create a "city that was drunk on foreign lucre."

Zac relied on his intelligence, his people skills and, above all, his talent for deception to insinuate his way into that world, "a realm of money and intrigue that could be intoxicating but also treacherous." It ended up costing him his life. How he went about that leads Keefe to consider how people misrepresent themselves, another of the book's fascinating threads. Zac's experience is an obvious example of that phenomenon, but it's true as well of Akbar Shamji, living behind a facade of business success that concealed a web of fraud. And, as Keefe explains in a fascinating aside, it was a trait that surfaced in the story of Hugo Gryn, Zac's maternal grandfather. Gryn, a Holocaust survivor who became a prominent British rabbi and who died before Zac was born, fabricated portions of his biography and suppressed another astonishing secret until the very end of his life.

As he demonstrated in SAY NOTHING and in the varied pieces collected in ROGUES, Keefe is both dogged in his determination to unearth the facts and adept at weaving them into a compelling narrative. He eschews some of the more exotic techniques of creative nonfiction, but his methodical and generally unvarnished approach to telling this story doesn't suffer as a result. Though some of his digressions, such as the exploration of Akbar Shamji's past, are lengthy, it becomes clear that these passages function in the service of the central narrative rather than detracting from it.

While Keefe ends up advancing a fairly obvious theory of the proximate cause of Zac Brettler's death, it's unlikely that this case will ever be solved in any conclusive way. That by no means diminishes the engrossing experience of reading LONDON FALLING. Driven by a deep empathy for the suffering of Zac's family, peopled with an intriguing and often colorful cast of characters, and written with an unassuming grace, it's a model of books in its genre.