London Falling

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, TIME, Oprah Daily, Vulture, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Cultured, LitHub, Service95, Bookriot

“Consider this a real-life Harlan Coben novel. After 19-year-old Zac Brettler plunges to his death in the river Thames, his grieving family discovers his secret life posing as the heir of a phony Russian oligarch. From there, Keefe reconstructs the seedy underbelly of London that the Brettlers delve into as they attempt to pinpoint what—or who—killed their son.”
—The New York Times

“A remarkable true-crime story. A 19-year-old fell to his death in London. Behind the tragedy lay so much more, as Keefe’s latest book uncovers. . . . The best true-crime stories use a particular event as a key to unlock a world, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest work of investigative nonfiction, London Falling, does just that. . . . Keefe finds, in the death of one teenager, both a private loss and a parable of the decay of a once great city.”
—Laura Miller, Slate

“A strange story of wealth, delusion, and violence. . . . [Keefe] shows how London’s vicious currents turn with the tides of finance and immigration. . . . London Falling has a Dickensian texture, but nothing is fictional. Dickens’s readers balk at his use of caricature and coincidence, but as Mr. Keefe shows, both are appropriate for a money-mad city full of affluence and anonymity, weird proximities and sudden death. . . . Keefe casts light on dark waters, and serves a measure of justice to Zac Brettler and his family.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Another blockbuster feat of reportage. . . . I sprinted through this addictive book in three days and gasped more than once at the true story’s twists and turns.”
—Adam Morgan, Esquire

“A propulsive true-crime story and surgical critique of the city’s glamorous façade and dark underbelly. . . . His reporting is broad and agile, his prose sharp-edged. . . . Keefe has written a morality tale for an amoral age while entertaining us with shootouts, robberies, heroin deals, and an enigmatic puzzle. His journalism is rooted in our obligations to each other, old-fashioned Eagle Scout citizenship, at a moment when might makes right and obscene wealth overwhelms our institutions.”
—Boston Globe

“London Falling, is [Keefe’s] most gripping book yet, using its initially narrow premise . . . as an entry point into the more expansive story of London’s underworld and the downstream effects of what happens when greed corrupts a city at its highest levels. As always with Keefe the pages turn themselves, and he sidesteps the exploitative pitfalls of the true-crime genre by finding thrills in the margins. . . . When Keefe returns to Brettler’s story, it becomes one about modern parenting and the search for peace amid unresolvable grief.”
—New York Magazine

“[Keefe] brings his capacious literary toolbox to a true-life tale that opens with the apparent suicide. . . . [His] stylish, suspenseful prose shines a light onto the seedy underworld beneath an international capital.”
—TIME

“Gripping. . . . Keefe is a master at using true crime as a vehicle for exploring social and political pathologies.”
—NPR

“London Falling is superbly gripping. This investigation into the real-life death of a teenage boy follows the trail where money, power and secrecy mingle in the capital. I predict it will become a defining book of our time.”
—Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times (UK)

“A profound exploration of parental grief and the search for accountability in a city that often protects its most shadowy residents. . . . Compelling.”
—Air Mail

“London Falling, grimly absorbing from start to finish, opens a window on to a world of financial dirty work and Walter Mitty-like fantasies of aspirational wealth.”
—The Guardian

“Remarkable. . . . Keefe has made a career of finding the human story at the center of large institutional failures, from the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, to the IRA and a woman who vanished in Belfast. With London Falling, he’s found something incredibly intriguing and personal, a family trying to understand their son after it’s too late. . . . Keefe resists easy moralizing. He is more interested in understanding and that may be what makes the book so hard to put down. Readers seem to find themselves rooting for a family to find justice while wondering, alongside them, whether justice is even possible.”
—Parade

“A master storyteller. . . . Fans of rigorous reporting, multilayered true-crime stories, and portraits of families in crisis will find something to love in this tour de force.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“The world knows Patrick Radden Keefe as one of the great living nonfiction writers. . . . Patrick’s reporting? Deep. His prose? Elegant. His tales? Enveloping. He is our foremost chronicler of illicit systems that would prefer to do their dirty work in the darkness, and which he drags into the light. . . . The book is a caper. A romp. Haunting. Profound. It’s about greed, delusion, predation, willful police incompetence, and the way money can poison the soul not just of a person but of a city.”
—Blackbird Spyplane

“A masterclass of evidence-chasing, narrative clarity and authorial empathy. . . . [An] impeccable (indeed unputdownable) investigative exercise. . . . A desperately sad family story, overlaid on a disturbing glimpse of London’s sinister, money-driven, exploitative underbelly.”
—Literary Review (UK)

“Makes for propulsive reading. . . . Keefe’s mastery of timing reveals makes [London Falling] a page-turner.”
—Irish Times

“Magnificent. . . . Keefe has a dramatist’s gift for structure and a novelist’s fascination with character and motive. . . . Riveting and powerful. . . . The book has its origins in a New Yorker article, but it goes so much deeper in its profound revelations. . . . This [is an] enthralling masterpiece, by one of the world’s great nonfiction writers.”
—The Observer

“One of the finest, and most famous, magazine writers in the English-speaking world. . . . Thrilling. . . . Astonishing. . . . Forms a topography not just of the physical London but its psychological terrain, its labyrinth of paranoia.”
—New Statesman

“Keefe has written his most intimate true story. . . . Suspenseful. . . . Compelling. . . . [Keefe] is that rarest of reporter birds, a deeply thorough investigative journalist who can actually write and tell a gripping human story. Anyone who starts London Falling will finish it quickly.. . . Under Patrick Radden Keefe’s relentless drive to get to the bottom of the story lies a deeper and darker distaste for the excesses of capitalism. . . . A tale of what happens when money becomes more important than human beings.”
—The Globe and Mail

“London Falling is, it goes without saying, a masterpiece. A novelistic study of parenthood, a portrait of the Anglo-Jewry, a fine-drawn sketch of teenage braggadocio, it also has perhaps the finest work of non-fiction about the London criminal classes, a milieu best known for their cinematic representations in Sexy Beast, The Long Good Friday and the various guilty pleasures that Guy Ritchie proffers.”
—The Fence (UK)

“Keefe, the author of some of this century’s finest nonfiction, has crafted another masterwork. This is a penetrating portrait of a young man destroyed by malignant influences given free rein in a global hub of capitalist excess. . . . Keefe might be our sharpest chronicler of the intersection of criminal opportunism and institutional fecklessness. . . . This is powerful reporting, a potential classic about the dangerous allure of a city remade as ‘a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money.’ An exemplary account of naïveté, wealth, and menace, impeccably told by a top-notch journalist.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] gripping investigation into a young man’s mysterious death. . . . In between piecing together the facts, Keefe zooms out, vividly portraying the morass of the modern London underworld. . . . Keefe’s approach is profoundly humane, particularly in his intimate interviews with Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle, who convey a deep desire to understand their late son. Despite the murky material, Keefe arrives at an artful and clarifying explanation. It’s a remarkable new turn for the celebrated author.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It feels like taking a weight off and settling into a warm bath, reading the first few paragraphs of a new work by an author so capable that the book’s quality is immediately evident. . . . That’s the joy of London Falling. . . . It’s John le Carré meets Skins in the newest thrilling effort from one of the best nonfiction writers working.”
—Bookpage (starred review)

“A meticulously researched propulsive thriller. . . . A feat of remarkable reportage. . . . Irresistible. . . . Keefe’s unerringly razor-sharp attention links these disparate elements of heedless ambition, uninhibited risks, and otherworldly privilege that created a powerful vacuum of want in a tenacious teen desperate for access. With empathetic insight, Keefe deftly sifts through facts and fictions to distill Zac’s young life, enthrallingly seeking the unknowable truth of his tragic death.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Nobody writes like Patrick Radden Keefe; nobody makes achieving something so powerfully complex and difficult look so easy. It’s a form of intellectual generosity and, I think, a form of genius. London Falling is a book everyone should read; it grips like a steel trap. To finish it is to be furious at the corruption, criminality and brutality hidden behind the facades of London’s wealth—but the warmth of the authorial voice, and the grace of the Brettler family, keep you from despairing.”
—Katherine Rundell, author of The Transformations of John Dunne and Vanishing Treasures