Examines the death of 19‑year‑old Zac Brettler, who jumped from a luxury London tower in 2019, and treats it as both mystery and social diagnosis rather than simple suicide.kirkusreviews+2
Shows how Zac’s invented persona as the son of a Russian oligarch exposes the seductive pull of wealth fantasy for a middle‑class teenager in a hyper‑financialized city.panmacmillan+2
Uses the Brettlers’ investigation as a narrative spine to explore London as “a twenty‑four‑hour laundromat for dirty money,” highlighting deregulation, offshore fortunes, and the professional enablers who service them.barnesandnoble+2
Links individual tragedy to structural forces: decades of deregulation, budget‑cut policing, and a culture that normalizes corruption and ostentatious luxury.tongue-in-cheek.binderybooks+2
Investigates the “underworld” behind glamorous real estate and private clubs, where aspirational fantasies intersect with extortion, intimidation, and criminal opportunism.bookshopwestportal+2
Portrays Zac’s parents’ grief and persistence, turning the book into both a family tragedy and a study of how ordinary citizens confront opaque institutions and moneyed power.dundee.spydus+2
Continues Keefe’s larger project (from Say Nothing and Empire of Pain) of using a single case to illuminate wider systems of violence, impunity, and institutional failure.patrickraddenkeefe+2
Strengths
Narrative drive and structure
Builds the story as a tightly plotted mystery—who Zac really was, what happened that night, and who benefited—while constantly widening the lens to politics and finance.kirkusreviews+1
Balances present‑tense suspense (the parents’ search for answers) with excavations of Zac’s double life and the city’s transformation into a haven for hidden wealth.panmacmillan+2
Reporting depth and access
Displays meticulous reporting: interviews with witnesses, immersion in Zac’s online and social worlds, and close attention to the mechanisms of London’s dirty‑money economy.tongue-in-cheek.binderybooks+2
Illuminates the role of “professional facilitators” (lawyers, bankers, fixers) who sanitize dubious fortunes, making systemic critique feel concrete rather than abstract.barnesandnoble+2
Character and emotional nuance
Treats Zac not only as a victim but as an adolescent shaped by social media, status anxiety, and fantasy, complicating any simple morality tale.instagram+2
Renders the parents’ grief and differing coping strategies with sensitivity, giving the book emotional heft beyond its investigative hook.bookshopwestportal+2
Systemic and cultural critique
Powerfully indicts how London’s embrace of global capital has created a city where everything is for sale and where malign forces flourish in the shadows of respectability.kirkusreviews+2
Connects policing austerity (the “bizarre passivity of Scotland Yard”) to broader state retreat, showing how institutional weakness enables private violence and financial crime.tongue-in-cheek.binderybooks+1
Weaknesses / potential limitations
Scope versus focus
The ambition to move from one young man’s death to a wholesale indictment of London’s financial culture may feel, to some readers, like an overextension of what the evidence can definitively prove.panmacmillan+2
The structural critique of deregulation and dirty money, while thematically crucial, risks occasionally overshadowing Zac himself and the granular details of his interior life.kirkusreviews+1
Reliance on reconstruction
As with many narrative investigations, key moments (Zac’s state of mind on the balcony, private conversations among criminals and facilitators) must be reconstructed from partial testimony, which can introduce interpretive slant.bookshopwestportal+2
The unknowability at the heart of the case—why this precise chain of decisions culminated in that night—may leave readers seeking a firmer resolution than the evidence allows.dundee.spydus+2
Moral and representational tension
The book necessarily turns a real family’s loss into a gripping story about money and power, which can raise questions about the line between illumination and exploitation, even when handled scrupulously.bookshopwestportal+2
By centering a single, highly mediated tragedy in a very elite corner of London, the narrative may underrepresent more everyday forms of harm produced by the same economic system.panmacmillan+2