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A teen’s mysterious death led to Patrick Radden Keefe’s ‘London Falling’

April 9, 2026

Over a clamor of background noise, author Patrick Radden Keefe’s voice somehow sounds clear and calm.

“I’m running around like a crazy person today because the book just came out. So you’re finding me at the bottom of the World Trade Center in a coffee shop,” he says as we connect on April 7, the publication day of his new work of nonfiction, “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.”

A New Yorker staff writer and the award-winning author of the bestsellers “Empire of Pain” and “Say Nothing,” Keefe has a packed book tour ahead of him that will have him traveling around the country — including an event April 15 at The Ebell of Los Angeles’s Lounge — before heading overseas over the next few months.

Keefe’s new book investigates the shocking 2019 death of Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old who plummeted from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury London apartment building into the River Thames. The police made little headway, but Zac’s parents, Rachelle and Matthew, were determined to find out what happened to their son, who had been leading a secret life pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. Had he intended to jump, or been forced to?

The couple, who had recorded their interactions with the police, entrusted the material to Keefe, who’d heard about Zac’s death by chance and was soon doing his own digging. The book, which began as a 2024 New Yorker piece, sent Keefe exploring everything from the lives of Zac’s grandparents, who survived the Holocaust, to the varied experiences of London’s ultra-rich.

“I think that they had a certain amount of confidence that I would tell Zac’s story and their story in a way that felt thorough and nuanced, and it wouldn’t get hijacked by the more sensationalist aspects of this whole saga,” said Keefe.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How are the Brettlers? I’m sure there are a lot of emotions surrounding the publication of this book.

I’m glad you asked. They seem good; they read the book a few months ago. They’re very supportive of it. I don’t think they have any regrets about having opened up to the extent that they did. They have actually flown to New York; they’re going to be here for the launch, Rachelle, Matthew and [Zac’s brother] Joe as well. So I’ve been texting with them all morning.

I think it’s a strange feeling for them to see Zac’s story told in such a public fashion. But I think they feel all right. We’ve been talking a lot about just how to be emotionally prepared for the weirdness of, you know, getting on the Tube in London and seeing somebody reading the book about your family.

It’s very strange, but if there’s one thing that I noticed about this family over the course of the years I’ve spent talking with them, it’s that they’re incredibly resilient.

Q. Most people have not had the chance to read the book yet. How do you describe it?

One of the biggest surprises happens pretty early on: it’s a story about this family who loses a child in mysterious circumstances because he goes off the balcony of this building.

At first, they’re confused and trying to understand how he could have died. But then, as they start asking questions, they learn that there were dimensions of his life that they’d had no understanding of. So it becomes a journey of discovery for these parents, both trying to solve the riddle of Zac’s death — but also the riddle of his life.

Q. You never met Zac, but you spent years researching his life. What’s your impression of him?

I think he was a really extraordinary kid. From an early age, he had a sparkly, improvisational personality, a gift for remixing reality in the way that a stand-up comedian would. So he was a big teller of stories and jokes, but somebody who, I think, from quite an early age started to lie, to embroider the truth, long before claiming that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.

I spoke to somebody who had first encountered him when he was 13 years old. And Zac was telling people that his mother had died, which she hadn’t.

He came from a very comfortable family. He had parents who loved him, had a lot of opportunities, but was growing up at a time in London when the city was becoming so distorted by extreme wealth that he actually felt as though he didn’t have enough and felt a kind of anxiety about that and wanted more. I think that’s what helped give rise to this false identity that he took on.

Q. The Brettlers took the unusual approach of documenting their search for their son. Can you discuss why they decided to do that, since for some people, that might seem like the last thing you would think of in those circumstances? But it certainly made a difference afterward.

I think they understood that they were going through a traumatic experience, and they might not be thinking clearly. And so when they recorded these conversations, I don’t think it was because they thought, ‘We’re going to use these against these guys in court.’ Or, ‘Oh, someday a journalist will come along, and we want to have a record of all this for him.’

I think it was more that they thought, ‘We are so worked up, we’re so desperate to find our son, as we have these really important conversations, we may not be thinking clearly. We want a record that we can go back and study afterwards.’ And that was why they did it.

For me, it ended up being this incredible gift from a reporting point of view.

Q. This book, like “Say Nothing,” has extensive endnotes, which not everyone includes in their books anymore. Can you talk about that?

It’s really important for me to include the notes for a couple of reasons. One is that when I sit down to write, I want the experience for you as a reader to be more like reading a novel than reading a history book. I want you to become absorbed in the scenes and with the characters, and I want you to feel a sense of narrative momentum.

I’m not shy about using the tricks of the trade that a novelist might use in a nonfiction book. However, I’m not making any of it up, and that’s the one iron rule: Everything has to be reported out. It’s important for me that I show my work, almost the way a kid would when they do a math problem. The vast majority of readers will never check the endnotes, but I want those notes to be there for people who are curious: How could you know that? I want you to be able to go to the back of the book and check.

Now more than ever — in a moment in which we have an assault on the press, we have an assault on the idea of objective truth, we have increasingly the prevalence of AI slop, in which people doubt the things that they see, the fundamental cornerstone of truthfulness that my whole profession and the kind of writing I do is built on — it feels more essential and important than ever.

Q. This is also a story about a police investigation, and I wonder if you might just talk about that aspect.

They placed a lot of trust in the police, in part because the police said, trust us. And then the police really botched it badly.

And so that’s the dispiriting, disquieting aspect of the story. The kind of exciting part of the story, from my perspective, is that in that vacuum, Matthew and Rachelle decide that they’re going to investigate themselves, and they actually make more progress getting to the bottom of what happened to Zac than the police ever did.

Q. You’ve said that you learned about their story while you were on the set of the adaptation of “Say Nothing.” I’m curious how often you’re approached by people pitching a story they want you to pursue.

I get pitched things all the time, in part because I think it’s very important to be available to people to hear those things. I get a ton of unsolicited notes, and the vast majority, for one reason or another, are just not a story for me.

Usually, when something is for me, I know pretty quickly. In this case, the guy I’d first heard the story from had said just a few sentences, and I knew this was one for me.

Q. Do you know what will be a good story for you?

It’s totally case by case. I wish there were rules; if there were rules, I’d probably be better at finding them. I just know it when I see it.

Q. You have built up an audience, and I’m curious how that affects which stories you pursue. This is a more personal and intimate story, and then you expand it out. Did you know you’d do that, or is that just where your reporting took you?

It was always important to me that there be larger themes that I was considering: the City of London; the ways in which money can corrupt; the challenges of raising an adolescent today, and even just the notion of identity and becoming and self-reinvention. There had to be a looser bundle of themes that I felt as though I could explore through this story. I wouldn’t have written the book if I felt like I was just stretching out the article.

I’ve done this four times now, where I’ve written a New Yorker article and then expanded into a book, and I haven’t done it more than that, because a lot of the time, you finish the New Yorker article, and I feel as though that’s it. This is all I ever have to say about something.

As I delved into it, I found all these strange echoes and ironies and coincidences, and all of that just felt really rich to me and like good material for something longer.

Q. “Say Nothing” is an incredible book. Have you learned more about that story since the publication of that book?

I mean, lots of little, small things; it’s a story that I follow. There are still threads all these years later that I want to pull and learn more about.

Q. Would you potentially revisit that story with a follow-up piece?

If there was something really explosive and big, then maybe. But most of the time, once I’ve done a big book, I like to walk away and move on.

Q. I thought about that with this book. You have such a personal connection with the family; this will likely be a different situation than normal for you, I’d imagine?

In this case, the book has just been optioned to be a television series. And it was very important for me that if I was going to do that, the family would be involved. It would happen with their blessing, but also with their active involvement. So we’re going to remain involved, working together on that.

Q. Are you able to talk at all about what else you might be working on right now?

I can. I can tell you I just closed a huge New Yorker piece last night. It’s a really wild story set in New Orleans, so that’ll be out in the New Yorker on Monday.

Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Ava Kofman

When: 7:30 p.m., April 15

Where: The Ebell of Los Angeles – Lounge, 741 South Lucerne Boulevard, LA

Information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writers-bloc-presents-patrick-radden-keefe-and-ava-kofman-tickets-1980439803765

Orange County Register

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A teen’s mysterious death led to Patrick Radden Keefe’s ‘London Falling’

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