I’ll be honest. If I were to one day meet a sudden, mysterious, and untimely death, I’d likely want this author to investigate and write a book about it. Say Nothing was a great read and introduced me to him. I saw London Falling as one of his newest books to come out, read a bit of the excerpt, and knew I had to read it. London Falling goes over the mysterious and sudden death of a teenager, and while that itself is unfortunately not surprising, the manner in which he died, along with the incompetent police investigation into it, led to many, many unsolved questions till this day, seven years later.

As one can expect, this is a tragic and sad story. It goes over the brief life of Zac Brettler, both when he was a young child, when everything changed once he went into private school, and finally, his death in November of 2019. The author spent around two years or so putting together this story with the help of Zac’s family. I was actually quite surprised at how quickly he was able to get this book out, along with the huge coincidence of how he came about the story in the first place. The parents kept the murder of their son away from the press for so many years while they hoped desperately for the police to find out exactly what had happened. Along the way, they had done their own sort of investigation. Ultimately, they were let down by the police not only because they weren’t able to figure out what happened to Zac but, more infuriatingly, they had done a bad job of not questioning key individuals in the case along with not chasing a multitude of other angles that would have helped with the investigation.

The story can get a bit windy sometimes, but I had trust in the investigative journalist in the author to understand that everything will eventually come together to give the readers a much clearer picture of the story. London Falling was a great non-fiction read, and I had breezed through it in just a matter of a couple of days. I do feel for the parents and basically any other parent out there in our society today having to raise kids. Zac’s story highlights the danger of today’s capitalism having run wild, along with social media adding to that longing for people always wanting something more in life, something that many believe can ultimately be solved with more money. To think that Zac’s story is of just one random teenager out there in society, it’s scary beyond belief of all the other stories out there of similar teenagers and adults that have succumbed to a similar fate that we will never read or hear about.