Patrick Radden Keefe examines mysterious death of London 'serial fabulist' Zac Brettler

In November 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler fell five storeys from a luxury London apartment and died—a death the Metropolitan Police ruled a suicide, though the circumstances resist such clean resolution. Brettler had spent years constructing a false identity as the son of a Russian oligarch, driven by a teenage hunger for belonging in a world of inherited wealth he could see but not touch. Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, in his new book London Falling, examines not only the gaps in the police inquiry but the deeper conditions that made Brettler's fabrication feel necessar