In 2023, Patrick Radden Keefe met a man who told him, "I might have a story for you." When you're Patrick — New Yorker staff writer, author of "some of the most memorable nonfiction books of the last decade" (that's the New York Times talking) — this is a hazard of the trade. But he heard the guy out.
The guy said he knew a family whose 19-year-old son had died in mysterious circumstances. "He went off the balcony of a luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames." When the boy's parents started looking into it, they made an astonishing discovery: Their son — a nice, upper-middle-class Londoner — had been running around the city posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.
"This guy said only about that much," Patrick tells us in today's episode, "and I knew if the family would talk to me, this was my next thing." His new book is London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth.
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