In November 2019, a London teenager named Zac Brettler plunged from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, an expensive luxury apartment building along the north bank of the Thames River. After weeks of speculation and mystery surrounding his death, closed-circuit television footage from the nearby headquarters of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, would reveal that he had jumped. But why? This question preoccupies London Falling, a masterly if eccentric and at times frustrating work of investigative journalism by the New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe.London Falling captures a particular moment in Britain that amounts to a nervous holding pattern. In an epoch wedged between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the COVID-19 pandemic, a seemingly endless stream of money flows into London’s real estate market, sports industry, and hospitality scene. Meanwhile, manufacturing and industry fade into irrelevance.This is a beautiful portrait of a rather sad era. Deprived of its old manufacturing and maritime industries, the island nation had reinvented itself as a service economy. Britain’s competitive advantage in absorbing vast quantities of new money from the world’s less stable regions, such as the former USSR, Africa, and the Middle East, is doing so while asking few, if any, questions.