In-Store: Patrick Radden Keefe: London Falling w/ Rachel Aviv

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket includes a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/-6LicVbksr8
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If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding 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.

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.

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.

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, psychology, and criminal justice, among other subjects. In 2025, she won a George Polk Award for magazine writing. Her 2022 book, Strangers to Ourselves, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her next book, You Won’t Get Free of It, will come out in July.

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