This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Patrick Radden-Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

And his last bookboard, this subtitle,

True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.

And without a doubt, Patrick writes some of the great page-turners in nonfiction today.

But these stories are not simple entertainments.

They connect crime and shady dealings to the biggest issues out there. Say

Nothing is about political violence under the IRA. Empire of Pain was about the Sackler family

and their role in the opioid epidemic. Two years ago, Patrick wrote in the New Yorker about the

death of a teenage boy in London in very mysterious circumstances.

And when he began to explore the story, he found the boy's life as mysterious as his death.

That story has now been published in Patrick Raddenkeef's best-selling book, London Falling.

Now, Patrick, the book tells a pretty terrifying story about this kid, Zach Brettler,

in a particular environment that's developed in London in the last, I don't know, 20 years or so,

the influx of huge amounts of foreign capital into London.

Yeah.

How did you find this story?

How did you find London falling? Well, so this one came to me

in exactly this way, in conversation. I was in the summer of 2023. I was living in London. I moved my

family over there because we were producing a TV drama based on my book, Say Nothing, which actually started as a piece in

The New Yorker, 2015. There was a guy who was a guest of the director that day. This guy said,

there's a family here in London, who I'm very close with, and they've had this tragedy. They

...