Patrick Radden Keefe's "London Falling" published April 7 and has since logged nine rave reviews on Bookmarks. [1] The New Yorker staff writer has a method — "Say Nothing" used one 1972 Belfast abduction to audit the Troubles; "Empire of Pain" used one family to audit the opioid epidemic. "London Falling" extends it: one teenager, Zac Brettler, falling from a Thames-side luxury apartment in 2019, becomes the frame for the London Russian money bought and never returned.

Brettler, son of middle-class North London parents, invented an oligarch identity for himself in his final months — the "son of a Russian gangster," as he put it to friends — before falling from the apartment of a man running money for figures around Vladimir Putin's inner circle. [2] Keefe's question is not what killed him. It is what city allowed him to imagine that identity as aspirational.

The answer, assembled across four years of reporting, is the London the 2022 sanctions regime was supposed to dismantle and did not. The properties, the shell companies, the enablers — lawyers, estate agents, private schools, reputation managers — remain. Zac's fantasy was accurate. The money was real. The impunity was real. The teenager was the only element the system did not recycle. [3]

The Times Book Review called it "a spellbinding account of a family's search for truth." [3] The Guardian called it "the definitive book on London's oligarch decade." [4] Neither quite named what Keefe is doing, which is what he has done for a decade — a body of work in which one death is always also the indictment of the economy that produced it. A24 has optioned it. [2]

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin