The Literary Wineaux Society

Hello Swans!

It's Time for JUNE BOOK CLUB! You voted and the winner is .....

Super thrilled to dive into this current #1 New York Times Bestseller (non-fiction) written by one of the best investigative journalists working today....

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe (the bestselling, prizewinning author of 'Say Nothing' and 'Empire of Pain') is a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.

Book Details:
Page Count: 384
Publish Date: April 7, 2026
Audiobook: 12 hours, 59 minutes. Narrated by the author

Additional Reading and Viewing

It's another meeting of the Swans. The Capote Brunch Society is a 1x month brunch inspired by Truman Capote's lunch with his high society swans. Instead of gossip, we will engage in discussing a hot topic long-form article (think Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal) while sipping on mimosas and diving our forks into a sinful stack of pancakes.

This is a small-group meeting so sign up early!
The article will be posted here the Thursday before the event.