Patrick Radden Keefe is fascinated by unsavory characters: drug lords, grifters, con artists, hustlers—people whose stories become increasingly complex in his books. “I’ve always been interested in force of personality and personal charisma,” Keefe says via Zoom from his home office outside New York City.
A New Yorker staff writer and the author of six nonfiction titles, Keefe has written about a motley range of figures, from fugitive drug lord El Chapo and Apprentice producer Mark Burnett to members of the Sackler family and the IRA. In person, he comes across as charming and affable but direct and in possession of all the qualities required to ferret out the truth.
Those skills are clearly on display in his latest, London Falling, out in April from Doubleday, which explores the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London in 2019 and his parents’ search for the truth about his life and ties to the criminal underworld.
Keefe first heard Brettler’s story in 2023 while in London for the filming of the television adaptation of Say Nothing, his 2018 book about the Troubles. A friend of the director knew Brettler’s parents; the story wasn’t in the papers yet and Keefe was captivated by the details.
Brettler had befriended shady businessman Akbar Shamji and gangland debt collector Verinder Sharma by conning them into believing he was the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. Soon after Shamji and Sharma learned the truth, Brettler fell to his death from Sharma’s apartment, and the police tried to determine if it was a case of foul play or whether he died by suicide.
At first, Keefe says, Brettler’s fake-it-till-you-make-it ambition seemed like familiar territory. Brettler was always looking for a big score, whether from a high-end real estate deal or a lifestyle scheme, and hoped to become one of the “roguish, blingy capitalist bros” he followed on Instagram, as Keefe describes them. But as Keefe dug into the circumstances surrounding Brettler’s death, initially for a 2024 New Yorker piece, the story became like no other he’d worked on.
For one, Keefe wasn’t used to having so much access: he spent hundreds of hours interviewing Brettler’s parents. “I’m often writing about people who don’t want to talk to me,” he says, “or who are dead.” Additionally, the project became personal for Keefe, who is raising two teen boys of his own. “It kind of snuck up on me. It turned out to be a book about relationships between parents and children and how well we really know the people who are our closest blood relations.”
After returning home to work on the New Yorker piece, Keefe had lunch with his longtime editor Bill Thomas, Doubleday’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “I told him the story, and he said, ‘This is the book.’ ” More information and sources came to light after the New Yorker piece published. “I always think of it as like Batman putting the bat signal up,” he says of turning a magazine article into a book.
Born in 1976, Keefe dreamed of becoming a magazine writer since he was a junior high school student in Boston. But his route to realizing that dream was circuitous. His first rejection letter from the New Yorker—framed on the wall of his office—came in 1998 when he was an undergrad at Columbia University. “It literally says something like, ‘We have no need for this,’ ” he says, laughing, “or like some very New Yorker kind of starchy way of telling you to fuck off.”
Keefe went on to earn graduate degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. As a law student at Yale, he parlayed his knowledge of international relations and information systems into his first book, 2005’s Chatter, an inquiry into the efficacy and ethics of government eavesdropping.
While studying for the bar exam in 2005, Keefe read about the trial of a human smuggler based in Chinatown who helped finance an ill-fated voyage to New York City for hundreds of undocumented migrants and refugees. Gripped by the story, he made his first successful pitch to the New Yorker. The article published in 2006, and it grew into The Snakehead (2009), the book where, he says, “I found my groove.”
He followed The Snakehead with Say Nothing, a game-changing commercial and critical success, which sold more than 400,000 copies, according to Circana BookScan; won a National Book Critics Circle Award; and made Keefe a fixture on late-night TV. And while he says he wanted to make Say Nothing “approachable” for readers without knowledge of the Troubles, he also attributes his success to luck. “Because this is Publishers Weekly, I should say that I’ve read too many books in galleys where I thought, God, this is going to be a big bestseller,” he says. “And then it comes out, and something goes wrong, and it kind of disappears.”
All of Keefe’s nonfiction narratives—including 2021’s Empire of Pain, which revealed how Purdue Pharma came to push OxyContin despite knowing it was addictive—are page-turners, a quality that comes in part from his stint as a screenwriter. “The thing that I got the most from screenwriting is actually all about structure,” he says. “Juxtapositions, keeping things in tension, introducing something and then cutting away—it’s wonderfully liberating and pleasurable when you can do that kind of stuff in nonfiction.”
In London Falling, Keefe documents the Brettlers’ search for the truth about their son’s life and death while also exploring family, love, and what it means to be a parent in the 21st century. As the book teases out the sordid histories of Shamji and Sharma, it evokes classic British crime films such as The Long Good Friday and Sexy Beast, illustrating the dangers that Keefe often brushes up against in his reporting and writing. “I have to be mindful of my own safety,” he says, but adds, “I don’t want to overstate the riskiness of what I do compared to a colleague who’s in a trench in Ukraine.”
Still, he’s willing to cultivate a “jocular rapport” with sources like violent gangster Andy Baker, who responded to the New Yorker article’s bat signal. A former associate of Sharma, Baker is regarded by his victims as “just the worst kind of malevolent human being,” Keefe says—a fact he refuses to whitewash. Still, he always approaches sources with “an open mind, to understand them as best I can.” And it was Baker’s perspective on Sharma that cemented Keefe’s conclusion about what happened to Brettler.
When Keefe first spoke to Baker, he was an ex-convict, claiming to be on the straight and narrow. Now, Baker is behind bars again, and wants Keefe to visit the prison to read from London Falling and sign donated copies of the book for his fellow inmates. The event would be a far cry from the typical stops on Keefe’s book tours. Then again, from the beginning, Keefe’s career has been all about picking apart what he calls “a kind of comforting fiction, which is that we live, all of us, on the right side of the law, and then there’s a moat separating us from all the badness, but it’s much more intertwined than we would like to think.”
As to whether he’ll accept Baker’s invitation, his answer is an emphatic “TBD.”
