Review of London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Patrick Radden Keefe,  London Falling

From the title reference to that historical bridge that keeps falling down to its tale of a Jewish immigrant family fighting for closure around the death of their son, London Falling earns a well-deserved place on any bookshelf devoted to London, its history, and its varied inhabitants. And it’s a true, deeply researched story that captures both a time and place beautifully.

On one level the book could be read as a police procedural. In that guise, it centers on a Scotland Yard investigation into whether a victim had experienced a fatal accident, committed suicide, or been murdered. Simultaneously, it tells the story of a youth cut down just before he arrives at full adulthood. That narrative then blends into his parent’s years-long attempt to understand how and why things went horribly wrong for their son. Finally, it sets the scene during a specific period of London history that features the city’s often unseen political, social, and criminal underbelly.   

Keefe’s retelling is based on several years of acquaintance with Rachelle and Mathew Brettler--the young victim’s parents--and his own interviews with the police and others who may or may not have been involved in possible cover-ups.   

Zac Brettler was nineteen years old when, in 2019, he fell into the Thames from the fourth-floor balcony of a high-end waterfront apartment building.  As the police try to figure out whether his death was a tragic accident, a suicide, or a murder, it is discovered that he had assumed a startling alter ego and was posing outside of his home as the hugely wealthy son of a Russian oligarch.

It is here that history becomes important. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, its economy collapsed, and huge amounts of capital held by escaping oligarchs were recycled into the British economy. These wealthy expatriates, many with checkered pasts, began to buy up expensive real estate, retail businesses like Harrods, manufacturing companies, and financial service organizations. Hundreds of get-rich opportunities were set before them by young British entrepreneurs who were more than willing to feather their own nests while they were helping them spend their fortunes. Professional British criminals were also quick to join in the rush to get a piece of the action.

Zac Brettler’s grieving parents soon discover that their son was not the person they were seeing in the family home. Zac’s impersonation put him in close contact with an assortment of  unsavory characters and few of them were keen to share what they knew about him after his death. Even more disconcerting, his parents begin to feel that the famed Scotland Yard was slow-walking the investigation. Not being the giving-up sort, they begin their own private investigation. It is that search that leads into an underground London of posh mansions, fancy cars, expensive private clubs, sexual and drug excesses, blackmail, and violence that runs like a sewer just below the Changing of the Guard and other famed tourist attractions. In that world, everything was for sale and fantasies, supported by mountains of money, were running rampant.

If this sounds familiar, a recent article in The Atlantic by Noah Hawley, titled “What I learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Estate,” echoes similar themes. Hawley says, If there are no cost boundaries then “everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all.” He describes the prevailing financial and political system as built on a “take as much as you can as fast as you can” foundation that ignores ethics and fairness to the millions who suffer as money is siphoned into the pockets of the ultra-rich. The only salvation may be people like Zac Brettler’s parents who stand up and fight.  

I found London Falling to be engrossing and tightly constructed. It may be too detailed for some, but each chapter does seem to add tension by introducing new theories about what might have happened to Zac and how genetic and environmental influences on Jewish immigrants and their children might have contributed to his demise. I have lived in London and written a book about its theatre history, but I learned some things about the city and its history that I didn’t know.  This is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

I give it a strong 4.5 out of 5

 

Harvey, Samantha  ORBITAL

Six multi-national astronauts, some men, some women, are aboard the International Space Station. They swoop around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour and experience 16 sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour Earth day. We hear bits and pieces of their lives, meet their families, share their ambitions and dreams, hear about their food, and learn about some of their scientific experiments. The astronauts spend a lot of time taking photos out of the windows and Ms. Harvey describes what they are seeing at length, right down to the lights of various cities.  

What this all comes down to is a work of philosophical meditation on what it means to be a human being within the great unknown of the cosmos. One topic considered at length is would we have been better off sitting tight with the medieval belief that God had dropped us at the center with all things revolving around us i.e., scuttle Copernicus. Or should we charge forward to the moon and beyond with the hope of unlocking more of the universe’s secrets?  A dose of cynicism was added to the mix by noting that we sent Voyager out and desperately hoped, but heard nothing and probably never will.  We didn’t ask to be born or to inherit an earth to look after.  We are after all, alone “a piddling speck at the center of nothing.” 

To give a better idea of her prose style a longer quote might be helpful. “Without the earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark, unswimmable sea.” This was followed by the admonition that we had better start thinking about taking better care of it.

I know this novel won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2024, but I must admit I found its lush prose getting too repetitive. After the fifth recounting of a sunrise, beautiful as it was, I began to skip ahead and search for something that would produce more dramatic juice. That search was fruitless, and we ended up with an award-winning novel that doesn’t really have much of a plot in the classic sense. We have a series of events, or should we say revolutions, but no complications to create tension, thus producing no real climax or final conclusion.

I get it that her goal seems to be a lyrical meditation on both the position of humanity and the fragility of our planet, but it also defeats some of her own purpose by creating a kind of numbing word salad without the tension needed to move me at the finish.

I give it a mild 3.5

Steve Barry THE OMEGA FACTOR

 

Steve Barry is touted as having millions of readers in multiple countries. I confess I have not been among them. His The Omega Factor is a long, rather uneven, and occasionally pedantic slog into the dark secrets perpetrated by the Catholic church over the years. If you have read any Dan Brown, you know what I am referring to. The church is fraught with venal, corrupt clergy and many secret underground cults--some of which have been functioning for a thousand years or more. The hero, Nick Lee, is some kind of United Nations employee in an area devoted to lost or purloined artwork. He has a past that includes a prison stretch for accidentally shooting a boyhood friend. Not much is made of this other than he now has a hatred of guns. He is also absent from the book for long sections on church history and some 14^th century scenes that feature the painter Jan Van Eyck’s spy career before he created his famous Ghent Altarpiece—an art work that has had a checkered history over time.

In the current day, there is an art restorer named Kelsey. Conveniently, nine years ago, she was about to marry Nick just before she changed her mind and became a nun in a highly secretive order called the Maidens of St. Michael. Kelsey discovers some overpainting on one of Van Eyck’s altarpiece panels and Nick is traveling to see her when her art restoration studio is fire bombed. The panel is destroyed, and another young member of the order is killed by the Belgian police. Little is made of why a competent and sophisticated police force would fill a young woman with bullets other than it was needed to further the main plot, which now turns to the possession of a computer that has a digital copy of the lost panel on it.     

Enter now the Vatican’s group of scheming, venal Friars, Bishops, and Cardinals to unravel the secret protected by the Maidens of St. Michael. I trust you might be beginning to believe that I was on the verge of quitting this hodgepodge a number of times. I wish I had.

Perhaps I got up on the wrong side of the bed, but I can only give this one a bare two out of five stars.  

 

 CAMINO GHOSTS BY JOHN GRISHAM

Camino Ghosts is the third of a trio of books centered around a Florida barrier island named Camino. In looking at some of the reviews, the three seem to be kind of cruise ship light, but are flagged positively for retaining enough legal fireworks to remind you that master storyteller Grisham is still at the helm.

A newly successful novelist and writing professor, Mercer Mann, comes to Camino Island to marry and find inspiration for her second book. That inspiration appears when she intersects with local bookstore owner, Bruce Cable, who tells her the story of Dark Isle that is just a stone’s throw from Camino. This tiny island has a scary and violent history that begins when a slave ship coming to the United States breaks up in a storm and deposits some of its survivors on the shore. Their 200-year history of survival was told in a self-published book authored by the last surviving inhabitant of the island, who is now living in retirement on Camino. Her name is Lovely Jackson, and she is a peach of a character who dresses to kill in flamboyant African outfits. You will fall in love with her and her style. Mercer reads Lovely’s book and sees the story as grist for her next writing project. She meets her and arranges to get even more information on the island and its long, tragic history.  

This relationship barely begins to bear fruit before a greedy commercial real estate company announces plans to develop the island as a resort, casino, and golf destination. Enter a semi-retired environmental lawyer who agrees to represent Lovely as she fights an ownership battle in the courts. No surprise now, it's suddenly the old Grisham again.

The courtroom battle is compelling, and all the right people win. There are some echoes of The Boys from Biloxi as the crusading underdogs battle the evil forces of corrupt big business, but overall this is an enjoyable if predictable read.

I give it a four out of five and will look for the first two in the series.  

THE BOYS FROM BILOXI by John Grisham

 

John Grisham needs no introduction. He has been churning out best-sellers for years and this 2022 offering is just another feather in his hat. Grisham is noted for his legal thrillers, but The Boys from Biloxi goes one step further by taking four generations of two invented families and inserting them into the history of the so-called “Dixie Mafia” that ran crime and vice on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the mid-twentieth century. The result is a huge 450 page “legal historical” thriller. His reach is spectacular, but thereby hangs the tale. The slow-building plot covers over a hundred years of ever-increasing passion and violence and although the first 150 pages seems to move at a turtle’s pace, it does finally pick up as we move toward the end.  

A summary goes like this. Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up as best buds in the turbulent sixties. Their grandparents were Croatian immigrants who settled along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and worked their fingers to the bone to make better lives for their children. The boys’ parents found success, albeit in different fields of endeavor. Hugh’s father, Lance, becomes the mob chieftain of bootleg alcohol, gambling, and prostitution along the Biloxi coast. His son, Hugh, eschews more education and moves directly into helping run his father’s criminal enterprises. Young Keith follows his dad, Rudy, into Law School and joins his dad’s passion for cleaning up the crime-ridden coastal strip and its long history of crime and political payoffs.   

I note again that you need some tenacity to get through the long years of buildup to the final legal battles that Grisham is so good at generating. One problem area early on is the amount of space devoted to the early high school athletic careers of the two grandsons and the too many  pages devoted to young Hugh’s boxing career. None of it seems to have much relevance to the later developments in the story.

I would like to have seen a few more developed female characters.   The family wives in the story exist only to have babies, keep house, and weep at the sad events. Most of the rest of the females are hookers. Also pretty much ignored is the impact of the South’s vast racial problem during that time.   

I cannot deny that the book, once you get into it, is compelling. The legal maneuvering is fascinating and the interplay of differing views of loyalty, justice, morality, and the impact of family ties is sure to foster plenty of discussion amongst readers.

I give it a 4 out of 5

 

THE DEFECTOR by Daniel Silva

 

Silva, Daniel  The Defector

I am a sucker for Daniel Silva’s espionage novels. Gabriel Allon is a fascinating character. He is a killer, no doubt, but has a backstory that includes faith, love, and even charity. There is also an artistic talent that seems as great as his assassination skills. Moving on, Silva has a skill in depicting locales. The streets, the buildings, the weather, the smells, the vehicles, the knowledge of tradecraft-- all are reproduced with such all-encompassing detail that he seems like a native of every place he writes about.

In this 2009 offering, Gabriel Allon is restoring art in Italy when a Russian defector, now living in London and who saved his life in the past, suddenly disappears. American, Russian, English, and Israeli intelligence all become involved as Allon vows to solve the mystery—the layers of deception stretch from London to Switzerland and finally to Russia itself.

When Allon’s wife, Chiara, becomes another kidnapping victim, the daring plan for her rescue generates a violent and deadly bloodbath. Although it long and a real page-turner, I did feel that Silva spent more pages stretching out the ending longer than necessary.    

Not his best, but still a solid 4 out of 5.

 

JIGSAW by Johathan Kellerman

 

Jonathan Kellerman has written an Alex Delaware novel each year for the last 40 years.  Jigsaw is his latest, and I’m sure his fans will be lining up to see the latest adventures of the two main characters. Detective Milo Sturgis, an overweight, gay man who has always been an outsider in his department, has survived in a profession that has never been keen on women or gay men, because his solve rate is higher than anyone else's on the force.  He gets a call on a run-of-the-mill murder case that at first glance seems a slam dunk. DNA on cigarette butts found at the scene point directly to the victim’s former boyfriend. Shortly, another murder occurs. This one turns out to be a retired detective who is now a recluse and major league hoarder. This victim was partially dismembered and stuffed into a deep freeze. The mental aberrations inherent in the case calls for deeper psychological consideration, and Milo’s good friend, child psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware is called into service. 

A third, even more egregious murder, goes down before the pair begins to suspect there are some connections between the crimes. As usual, plenty of red herrings swim into view before the real perpetrator is uncovered and the jigsaw of the title is explained. Whether you are a Kellerman fan or new to his books, you’ll find this is a quick and satisfying read. It’s a perfect bedside table or summer beach read. You won’t be disappointed as the two sleuths work their way toward the solution of another complicated murder puzzle.  

A solid 3.5