An 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.
A propulsive true-crime story and surgical critique of the city’s glamorous façade and dark underbelly ... Ever a deft stylist ... His reporting is broad and agile, his prose sharp-edged ... Yet in a book about concealed (occasionally half-concealed) agendas, it’s fitting that Keefe has an agenda of his own. When the Met’s 'maddeningly incurious' detective stonewalls the Brettlers’ queries, the author becomes their sleuth ... Why not probe Zac’s sociopathic tendencies? Was Keefe co-opted by his friendship with the Brettlers? London Falling treads the fine line journalists walk when they bring biases to their reportage.
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 ... While Keefe eventually comes up with a plausible scenario of what happened to Zac, for multifarious reasons—primarily that everyone involved was a liar—we’ll never know the truth for sure. In the end, however, all the stories Keefe assembles in London Falling strongly suggest that it was the city that destroyed the boy ...
