June 28 2026

London Falling Book Club Questions

Welcome to the Buddy Book Club – we have a light-hearted comedic podcast that covers a variety of books. The Buddy Book Club doesn’t read many non-fictions, but made an exception for London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe because of multiple recommendations.

London Falling at its core is a true-crime book about the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a luxury London apartment, and his parents’ investigation into his secret life as “Zac Ismailov” — the fake son of a Russian oligarch.

Our book club questions try to be a little more outside the box and comedic than your typical book club questions — hopefully you enjoy them.

Discussion Questions

The biggest question of this book: do you believe Zac’s death was a suicide? And on a scale from 0 to 100, what percentage of blame do you put on Zac himself? On his parents?

We had mixed feelings on this one (which we argued extensively about on the podcast). Where do you stand?
Were you a bit shocked by the somewhat lackadaisical nature of the British judicial system? Does it make you appreciate your country’s judicial system a bit more?

Characters in this book are beating and murdering people and either not getting charged or getting released from jail in a few years’ time. Not to mention the investigation skills seem to be lacking.
Do you have sympathy for Zac? The book doesn’t paint him in the best light. Someone who was compulsively lying, choking his mom, living a privileged private school life.

Easy to sympathize with his parents, hard to sympathize with Zac despite how young he was.
How do you think Zac was able to get away with conning so many people? It seems like in the age of Google Search and social media this would be very hard to do.

Nobody did basic due diligence on Zac before handing over millions for Lisbon real estate deals. He had a fake Instagram, didn’t speak Russian, met people outside of One Hyde Park but never inside, and took all the pictures off the walls when visitors came over. How did seasoned con men get out-conned by a teenager?
PRK summarizes the whole situation in one line via Zac’s mom: “Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t… It was three bullshit artists selling air.” Does that sum up the book well?

Did this need to be a 12-hour book? Could the whole story have lived as a long New Yorker piece instead?
If your mysterious death were investigated to the depth of Zac’s, what uncomfortable truths would a Patrick Radden-Keefe type uncover?

Don’t look at our search history or Uber Eats delivery history please.
Zac wasn’t necessarily destroyed by social media specifically, but by the constant comparison to people whose wealth dwarfed his family’s considerable wealth. He felt poor among the super-rich. Is there a cure for that mindset, or does being surrounded by extreme wealth make normal wealth feel like poverty regardless of the era?

Seems like he needed to get a bit of perspective — maybe do some charity work or live on the other side of the tracks for a week.
PRK calls something “a home run with the bases loaded” instead of a grand slam. Is this the biggest oversight in the book?

A meticulous journalist with 60 pages of source material gets a basic baseball analogy wrong. Does this undermine his credibility (we joke, we joke… kind of)?
Who would you cast in a movie version of this book?

We do casting for other books — may be a bit hard for this one since it’s non-fiction, but give it a shot.
What would you rate this book and who would you recommend it to?

We had mixed reviews on this one even though it came highly recommended.