An Evening with Patrick Radden Keefe

🎟️ Please note: Tickets are REQUIRED. Each ticket admits two (2) guests into the venue and includes one (1) copy of London Falling ($35+ tax). Books will be handed out upon entry. Additional books will be available for sale at the event. Can't make the event?

The frame for LONDON FALLING is a mystery story – why did a young man from a loving family pretend to be the child of a Russian billionaire? And why did he jump from the balcony of a luxury apartment building into the Thames? Was it suicide, as the police seemed to use an as an excuse for their limited investigation? Or something much more sinister, as the evidence Patrick uncovered suggests?

LONDON FALLING is first and foremost a stunning story of corruption and tragedy in one of the world’s great cities. London is a dazzling international landmark, dotted with posh private clubs and gleaming new skyscrapers, $500,000 sports cars and superyachts docked on the river. It is awash in money, but as Patrick Radden Keefe shows, that money is as dirty as it gets. Illicit fortunes from oligarchs and arms merchants and drug dealers washed clean with the willing complicity of lawyers and bankers, the government – and the police. The membrane between respectable, upstanding people going about their business and grotesque corruption is incredibly thin. One doesn’t have to look terribly hard to see what happened in London starting to happen in America. LONDON FALLING also brings to light the culture of British gangsters, whose colorful lingo, cheerful pride in their bank heists and extortion rackets and brutal violence makes Guy Ritchie movies seem quaint.

But at its heart, LONDON FALLING is about grief. Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, were the parents of the nineteen year-old kid who jumped off that balcony. Zac, their son, like many teenagers, was secretive and difficult, and the Brettlers agonized over how much space to give him, and worried about what he was up to. When he died, they had to cope with the devastation of his death, but also the deceptive double life he was leading, pretending to be the heir to the fortune of a Russian oligarch. The fact the police seemed so uninterested in the case made their agony that much more acute. Any parent knows the anxiety of watching a child trying to figure out who they are during adolescence, and the fear their bond will be broken. For the Brettlers, that fear was realized in the worst way imaginable, and their search for some understanding, as a way of coping with their grief, gives LONDON FALLING its intensity.

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain (winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize) and Say Nothing, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Book Review. His work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He served as an Executive Producer on the award-winning FX series "Say Nothing," based on his book. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast “Wind of Change,” about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Books & Books