MJ Franklin: Friends, we're back and it's time for book club. Hello and welcome to the book review from the New York Times. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times book review and the host of the book review book club. And today I'm with Jennifer Szalai, our non-fiction book critic here at the New York Times. Hi, Jen. Thank you for joining us.

Jennifer Szalai: Thanks so much for having me.

MJ Franklin: And we're also with Sadie Stein, a fellow editor here at the book review and a frequent book clubber.

Sadie Stein: I'm delighted to be here for this one.

MJ Franklin: Thank you for joining us. And this week we are talking about Patrick Radden Keefe's latest book, London Falling. This book club, this conversation is an episode of firsts. It is our first non-fiction book club pick so far in the book review book club's history. It is also Jen, it's your first book club. You've been on the podcast before, but this is the first time you're on the book club. How are you feeling?

Jennifer Szalai: That's true. I'm feeling excited.

MJ Franklin: That's the right answer.

Jennifer Szalai: I'm nervous. [laughter]

MJ Franklin: Feel excited. Yes. Don't feel nervous. This is going to be great.

Sadie Stein: Okay. I have been very excited in turn to be here for your first book club episode and feel honored, frankly.

Jennifer Szalai: Thank you.

MJ Franklin: It's a conversation amongst friends and we're going to talk about this great dishy book. But before we do that, I have my typical admin notes. First, there will be spoilers in this episode. However, to keep this conversation accessible to all, we're splitting it up. The first half will be spoiler light. We try to keep things spoiler-free, but this is a mystery. Every element of this book feels like some type of revelation, but we will save the big conclusions, the big revelations until the second half, which will be spoiler-filled. So, choose your own adventure based on what you want to know. So, that is note number one. Note number two, at the end of the episode, we will reveal our September book. So, make sure you stay tuned for that. Before we dive into the meat of our conversation, I just want to provide some context on the book for those who may not be as familiar with Patrick Radden Keefe or the book itself.

MJ Franklin: Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer for The New Yorker. But in addition to that, he's also the author of some very famous, popular books, including Say Nothing, which is about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, which is about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. His latest book, London Falling, investigates the mysterious death of a young man named Zach Avery, who fell from the balcony of a luxury penthouse in London's wealthy Kensington neighborhood in March of 2022. Zach was the son of very wealthy American parents. His mother was a successful businesswoman and media executive, and his father was a former partner at Goldman Sachs. On paper, Zach seemed to have this perfect life, but as Keefe investigated Zach's death, he found that Zach was embroiled in a world of drug dealers, criminals, and illegal dark web marketplaces. The deeper Keefe dug into Zach's death, the more questions he found, eventually painting a picture of London and the British establishment that is truly shocking. So, Jen, Sadie, what were your initial thoughts about this book?

Sadie Stein: I had a feeling that I wouldn't like it. I loved his previous work, but to be honest, I'm often skeptical of the true crime genre. But once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I read it almost in one sitting. I thought the themes around class, money, and cool were so sharp. Every page offered something surprising that defied my expectations.

Jennifer Szalai: I completely agree with Sadie. Keefe is such a master of narrative and investigative journalism. I actually reviewed this book for the Times, and often when you read for review, it's a slightly different experience than reading purely for pleasure. But even with my critical hat on, I was just swept up by the momentum of the story. The reporting is so meticulous, yet it reads like a thriller. What struck me most was how he avoids easy moralizing—he treats Zach neither as a saint nor as a villain, but as a deeply conflicted young man lost in this web of privilege and danger.

MJ Franklin: Jen, in your review you mentioned that London itself is a character here. How does Keefe capture this collision between elite privilege and the criminal underworld?

Jennifer Szalai: London has this bizarre, dual nature in the book. On one hand, you have Kensington and Chelsea, funded by offshore money, Russian oligarchs, and ultra-wealthy elites. On the other, there is this brutal underworld fueled by dark web marketplaces, cryptocurrency, and violent drug gangs. Zach Avery was standing right at the intersection of those two spheres. He attended elite private schools and had access to immense wealth, yet he was drawn to the adrenaline and danger of dark web trafficking. Keefe shows how the legitimate establishment and the criminal underworld actually feed off the same financial structures and legal loopholes.

Sadie Stein: Exactly. And the culture of British private schools Keefe describes is fascinating. The combination of intense wealth and emotional detachment creates this illusion of invulnerability among young men. Zach thought he could play at being a criminal mastermind on the dark web while remaining safely insulated by his family's status. But the real underworld operates by rules that don't care about your family pedigree.

MJ Franklin: Let's talk about Keefe's craft. Compared to the expansive, multi-decade timelines of Say Nothing or Empire of Pain, this book is tightly focused on a more recent and bounded event. How does his narrative architecture work here?

Jennifer Szalai: His structural control is remarkable. He weaves disparate threads together like a master watchmaker: Metropolitan police records, dark web forums, encrypted chats, interviews with Zach's grieving parents, and testimony from shady underworld figures. What I admire most is his restraint. He resists the urge to sensationalize or deliver a simplistic moral verdict on the Avery family. By laying out the evidence with journalistic rigor, the unsettling truths hit much harder.

Sadie Stein: And the texture of the prose is brilliant. Keefe creates these vivid, atmospheric scenes, whether it's a rain-slicked London alley or a luxury penthouse reeking of weed and expensive cologne. Every peripheral character, from low-level runners to posh schoolmates, feels completely three-dimensional.

MJ Franklin: All right, listeners, this is our official pivot into heavy spoiler territory. If you haven't read London Falling yet and want to preserve the mystery, pause here, go finish the book, and come back! Jen, Sadie, let's dissect the fatal fall itself. Officially, there was initial speculation about suicide or an accidental fall induced by heavy drug use. But what did Keefe uncover that blew that narrative apart?

Jennifer Szalai: The red flags are everywhere. First, the physical evidence at the scene and the shocking sloppiness of the initial Metropolitan Police investigation. They missed crucial forensic clues. As Keefe dug into encrypted messages, autopsy reports, and toxicology, a much darker reality emerged: Zach was under immense extortion pressure. He was in deep debt to dangerous criminal figures after a series of botched dark web deals and locked cryptocurrency wallets. On the night of his death, the evidence strongly suggests he was either trapped in the penthouse with hostile actors or trying desperately to escape an imminent violent confrontation.

Sadie Stein: The text messages are chilling—phrases like 'heat up the knives,' a gruesome underworld idiom. Zach was entirely isolated. He couldn't confess the true scale of his illicit operations to his parents, while the violent criminals circling him were demanding tens of thousands of pounds. Whether he fell while trying to scramble across balconies to escape or was physically pushed, he was unmistakably hounded to his death by that underworld machine.

MJ Franklin: Talking about Zach's parents, Matthew and Rashelle, the portraits of them are utterly heartbreaking. They are highly accomplished people, yet they experienced this profound cognitive dissonance regarding their son's secret life.

Jennifer Szalai: Exactly. Keefe is brilliant at capturing this nuance. His parents clearly loved him, but their immense wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyle created a protective bubble that masked his unraveling. When Zach claimed he was doing 'crypto arbitrage' or tech startups, his parents, unfamiliar with the technical realities and trusting of his elite schooling, took it at face value. Only after his death did they undergo the excruciating process of learning who their son really was. That class-conditioned blind spot is the emotional core of the tragedy.

Sadie Stein: That blindness extended to the police and judicial system as well. Had this happened to a working-class kid in East London, the investigation would have had an entirely different trajectory. Because it happened in a multi-million-pound Kensington penthouse, authorities quickly labeled it an unfortunate 'posh boy misadventure,' completely bungling the early opportunity to track down the violent extortionists.

MJ Franklin: In our closing segment, keeping with book club tradition, we each share a related reading recommendation for those who enjoyed London Falling. Sadie, do you want to kick us off?

Sadie Stein: I'm going in a fiction direction with Patrick Hamilton's classic novella The West Pier, or his trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Even though it's fiction, Hamilton's razor-sharp depiction of petty con artists, middle-class delusions, and London's seedier underbelly resonates deeply with the world Keefe exposes in London Falling.

Jennifer Szalai: My recommendation is non-fiction: Oliver Bullough's Moneyland and Butler to the World. These books investigate how Britain's financial and legal institutions turned London into the premier laundering hub for global kleptocrats and illicit fortunes. It provides the macroscopic economic reality behind the street-level criminal mechanics described in London Falling.

MJ Franklin: My recommendations are John Carreyrou's Bad Blood and Keefe's own collection of essays, Rogues. Both brilliantly dissect ambition, deceit, and systemic blind spots. Thank you so much, Jen and Sadie, for this fantastic conversation!

Jennifer Szalai: Thank you MJ, it was great!

Sadie Stein: Fantastic conversation, looking forward to the next one!

MJ Franklin: Finally, it is time to reveal our September book club pick: Etna by Paul Yoon. It is a haunting post-war story told from the perspective of a dog trying to find its way home. You can find the discussion thread on the New York Times website right now, and we will broadcast our podcast discussion on Friday, September 25th. Until then, happy reading!