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London Falling

A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

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London Falling

Auteur(s): Patrick Radden Keefe
Narrateur(s): Patrick Radden Keefe
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.
Crime organisé Meurtre Relations True Crime Éducation des enfants Angleterre Espionnage Fiction
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After listening to Say Nothing last year, I saw Radden Keefe's interview on the New York Times YT channel pop up on my feed. I spent about 5 minutes listening to it, before shutting it off and rushing here to listen to the audiobook.

This is investigative journalism at its best, with heaps of details and a number of relevant tangents that always seem to return to Zac Brettler's life, and his death. The description of a privileged upper middle class life in London at the start of the story was a bit grating for me personally, but it is vital background for the story. I do not want to give anything away, except that it is a truly tough listen at times, as Radden Keefe begins to strip away the lies, the facades, and the cons that conceal the circumstances around Zac's death. This is not simply a true crime story, it's a portrait of a city, as told through the many stories that orbit around one horrific night in 2019. It's not a happy book, but it's a necessary one, and I hope it brings some closure to Matthew and Rachelle.

The overall performance by Radden Keefe in reading the book is great, with a couple of tiny exceptions (for some reason, he uses an English accent on the word "can't", sometimes when speaking as an English person, sometimes when he's narrating). It's not worth knocking off a star however.

Overall, it's a fantastically researched and well-narrated story that deserves to be heard and read as much as possible. R.I.P. Zac Brettler.

A Fantastic Audiobook of a Sad, Sad Story

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Couldn’t put it down, dragged a slight bit in the middle, but would read again.

Astoundingly good

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