How well can a parent really know their children, especially when they display an early knack for lying?
I’ve read a couple of Patrick Radden Keefe’s books, so when people kept raving about this book, I believed them.
It’s so good,
Essentially, it’s about the death of Zac Brettler.
Or is it Zac Ismailov?
Keefe does an excellent job building his case in this book.
As an investigative journalist, he doesn’t state any conclusions, but he leads his readers to a certain conclusion that I will not spoil for you.
He starts by talking about Zac as a child and how adept (and prone) he was at lying and making up fictional stories about his own life.
Fastforward a decade or so, and it’s easy to see how this kid could have lied himself into London’s criminal underworld.
I was especially taken in by Zac’s reported reverence for movies like Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs, neither of which showed me any semblance of a life I want.
But if Zac saw those movies and saw a life he does want, that says a lot about him.
It also explains his attraction to oligarchs.
Whether Russian, Indian, or Saudi, Zac doesn’t care as long as they can provide the lifestyle he sees his classmates living.
Not only does Zac get involved with London’s crime lords, but he makes the capital mistake of promising them money.
It’s not enough to pretend he’s from a wealthy family, he acts like he can get money for the crime lords.
On the one hand, I would like to know how Zac thought that was going to end.
On the other hand, he was only 19 when he died. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that teenagers are idiots without the ability to forecast the consequences of their actions.
Although Zac’s death was technically caught on camera, there are so many questions surrounding his death.
Did he commit suicide?
Was he suicidal?
Does anyone know when those closest to them are suicidal? (Not usually.)
Or was he trying to jump to safety and misjudged the jump?
We’ll never know, but Keefe does such a good job of painting a picture for the reader.
Keefe talked to everyone who would talk to him. After much reluctance, Zac’s parents finally agreed to talk to him, having seen that keeping quiet earned them nothing.
But of course the people most intimately involved in Zac’s death (the crime lords) refused to talk to him.
All Keefe had to go on was public records about their shell companies and their police interviews.
By the end of the book, Keefe has built a narrative, not only of a young man gone astray, but of foreign oligarchs who successfully managed to so ingratiate themselves into London society that they can literally get away with murder.
This book is as good as everyone says it is and you should absolutely read it.