In the small hours of 29 November 2019, a young man was captured on CCTV jumping from a fifth-floor flat on Millbank on the Thames. His body struck the embankment wall on the way down, and he drowned in the water below. It emerged that he was 19-year-old Zac Brettler, a former public schoolboy from Maida Vale known for telling “tall stories”, said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. That night, he’d been in the apartment with “gangland debt collector” Verinder Sharma, and another associate, a cryptocurrency and real estate trader named Akbar Shamji. There was evidence that the two men, who’d befriended Brettler weeks earlier, had assaulted him shortly before his death – though neither was charged by police, who concluded that the death was probably suicide.
In this “scrupulously researched” and “page-turning” book, The New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keefe revisits the case – and reaches a different conclusion. Opening a disturbing window onto Britain’s capital, with its dirty money and “Walter Mitty-like” fantasies of wealth, “London Falling” is a “grimly absorbing” work.
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