This is a page turner you won't be able to put down. Which can be an odd thing to say about a non-fiction book. Especially when you know how it will end. And when it can't explain why it happened.
Being a parent, you might be wondering whether your children will mix with the wrong sort of people. In the traditional sense we think of bullies, drug addicts and the like. But this book is about a boy, Zac Brettler, nineteen-year-old from a well-off family, who mixed with the unexpected sort of people. And it leads to his death by falling from a luxury apartment block on the Thames.
Only later you learn he was living a second life. Starting with jokes some might have taken for reality, to a web of lies it's difficult to run from. Up to the point where he's passing himself off as the son of a Russian oligarch. And as the book puts it - that's a position that's already very dangerous to be in among some people.
Keefe follows Zac's parents on their journey trying to find out what happened. What he might have felt in the last minutes of his life.
Having lived there, it's those nitty-gritty details of London that match my experience. The city I remember. The city where everything is possible. And as it might have been the case for Zac - the element of fake it till you make it. Zac was hardly the only one in this book pretending to be something that he wasn't. Unfortunately for him, he just couldn't make it.
This is a book about a city where gangsters meet businessmen. And sometimes you have a hard time telling who is who. This is not a Guy Ritchie ode to mobsters. It's just about people you would not want to meet, and the uncomfortable distance between them and ... the rest of the world.