Patrick Radden Keefe — London Falling
New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe investigates a teenager's mysterious death in the Thames and the London underworld of property speculation and corruption it revealed.
Why we picked this
Keefe's gift is for finding the system inside the crime — 'London Falling' promises to do for London's financial underworld what 'Empire of Pain' did for the opioid crisis: make visible a structure most people could see but not name.
Patrick Radden Keefe — staff writer at The New Yorker, National Magazine Award winner, and author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing — has built his career on a specific kind of investigative narrative: stories that begin with a particular crime or person and widen to expose the system that made them possible. London Falling, his new book, starts with the 2021 death of teenager Zac Brettler in the Thames and follows Keefe into a world shaped by property speculation, mercenary realpolitik, and the culture of bling that defines a certain stratum of contemporary London.
The book grew from a 2024 New Yorker investigation that traced how three individuals became entangled in a dangerous London underworld — the kind of entanglement that looks inexplicable from the outside until Keefe shows you the incentive structures, the legal gray zones, and the social dynamics that made it almost inevitable. His method is to be genuinely curious rather than prosecutorial, which is what allows him to get sources talking and readers trusting.
This Town Hall evening is presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures, which has brought Keefe to Seattle before and whose programming consistently prioritizes writers who do serious reporting in literary form. Doors open at 6:30 PM; the event is available both in-person and via livestream.