Patrick Radden Keefe

Often people who are connected to the Russians in one way or another.

And there is a tendency, a really pronounced tendency, by the police and the authorities in England to kind of look the other way, to sort of say, oh, looks like a suicide, looks like an accident.

A sort of a sense of, you know, we don't want to antagonize powerful Russian forces that may actually be sending hitmen to England to murder people.

It's ironic by itself, yeah.

Yeah, I think that really the main characters in this book are Rochelle and Matthew Brettler, Zach's parents, who after his death in 2019 are trying to figure out what happened to him.

And, you know, in the first instance, I think they placed their faith in the Metropolitan Police, who kind of botched the investigation.

Then the Brettlers have to sort of, in a way, follow their son's footsteps, retrace his footsteps in life, figure out who was he really, who was he hanging out with, what was he up to.

And that's a journey that takes them into a side of London that they had not known existed.

And so suddenly they find themselves there.

Really kind of going out and seeking out gangsters and dodgy businessmen and getting a real sense of this kind of slightly sleazy but omnipresent milieu in which their son had been moving.

And I think the part of what was so strange for them is that they had been living with a sort of, you know, maybe a kind of bourgeois, slightly naive sense that everything's okay here on this side of the tracks, that we live in this kind of nice, functional, kind of sparkling London.

I think that they were astonished to...

realize how intermingled these two worlds are in ways that they had just had no inkling of.

It was really only after Zack's death, as they tried to kind of see what he'd been getting up to, that it was like they developed a kind of x-ray vision and they could see a dimension of London that had eluded them before.

So on that particular evening, Zach was in a building called Riverwalk, the sort of development that would be familiar to people who've spent time in London in recent years, a super luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames right on the river.

So if you know where MI6 headquarters is, just opposite MI6 headquarters.

Zach was in an apartment with two men.

One, a guy named Akbar Shamji, and then another named Verinder Sharma.

And these were two older men who he had become quite close friends with in the preceding months.

And at a certain point, Akbar Shamji had left the apartment, so it was just Verinder Sharma and Zach.