Description
In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler plunged to his death from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. Security cameras captured him alone on the balcony moments before he jumped. But almost everything that led him there remained unexplained.
In the months that followed, Zac’s parents began piecing together a secret life they scarcely knew existed. Their son had been posing as “Zac Ismailov,” the heir to a vast Russian fortune, and had found his way into a strange world of wealthy businessmen, gangsters, expensive apartments, invented identities, and questionable money. The deeper his parents looked, the more troubling the circumstances surrounding his death became—and the more frustrated they grew with the police investigation.
Patrick Radden Keefe takes this mystery as the starting point for a remarkable work of narrative journalism. Following Zac’s parents in their search for the truth, Keefe reconstructs their son’s double life and the extraordinary cast of characters surrounding him. This is a true-crime story that grabs you and doesn’t let go. It is a story of aspiration, deception, and grief in a city known for blending appearance and reality.
Originally published in The New Yorker in 2024, Keefe’s investigation became the foundation for his 2026 book London Falling. The original story, which we are preparing for the next Thornwillow Dispatch, is where it all began.
