# Read the first page of London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe Read the opening of London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe free, no signup. Parents investigate their son's secret criminal identity after his death. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/london-falling-patrick-radden-keefe - Genre: True crime - Year: 2026 - ISBN: 9781035056286 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781035056286&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781035056286 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781035056286 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ PROLOGUE THE HEADQUARTERS OF BRITAIN’S Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, occupies an imposing edifice of concrete and green glass on the south bank of the River Thames, in London. It was erected in the early 1990s, alongside Vauxhall Bridge, under circumstances of such secrecy that when the architect was commissioned to design the building, he did not know who he was designing it for. The Thames is a tidal river, its powerful currents ebbing and surging twice each day with salt water from the North Sea. Occasionally a bottlenose whale will veer off course, separated from its pod, and wander downriver, dangerously far from the ocean. When the tide recedes, the Thames shrinks, its level plummeting by as much as twenty feet, exposing a muddy shoreline. Urban beachcombers – ‘mudlarks’, as they’re known – have unearthed artefacts of previous civilizations from the silt along the riverbanks: Bronze Age daggers and Iron Age coins. It was the Thames that first drew the Romans, two thousand years ago, to establish a walled entrepôt, which they gave the name Londinium. By the heyday of the British Empire, London had colonized a quarter of the globe. In 1860, half of all exports from Asia, Africa and Latin America were sent there; the Thames was the busiest port in the world. Hundreds of ships arrived each week, and towering cranes unloaded tobacco, ivory, spices, wool, rice, tea and other treasures. The river was teeming, thrumming with commerce, jostling with all manner of vessels and tradesmen and stevedores and mariners from strange lands, hinting at the existence of other civilizations over the horizon. But the riverbank could be a frightening place as well. In the Victorian era, the waterfront was rife with crime. People had an alarming tendency to die in the Thames, whether voluntarily, in a moment of despair, or because somebody pushed them. If you misstepped on a slick cobble after a night out drinking, the black water could suck you under in an instant. In the work of Charles Dickens, the river was often depicted as a malignant force, grimy and malodorous, ‘lapping at piles and posts and iron rings, hiding strange things in its mud, running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies’. This was the paradox of the Thames: it was the pulsing artery of London’s industrial boom, with vast factories and warehouses swarming with labourers and belching smoke along its banks. But at the same time, Dickens saw in the river ‘an image of death’, a ribbon of danger coiling through ‘the midst of the great city’s life’. The design of the MI6 building was meant to evoke Britain’s industrial era, echoing the monolithic power stations, like Battersea and Bankside, which stood nearby. But by 1994, when Queen Elizabeth II presided over the opening of the new spy headquarters, the power stations had long since been decommissioned and now seemed like artefacts themselves, relics of London’s vanished past as a factory town. The city had shuttered most of its factories; between 1960 and 1990, jobs in the manufacturing sector declined by 80 per cent. Shipping, too, had disappeared. In 1955, an American trucking executive from North Carolina invented the modern stackable shipping container. The standardization of these twenty- and forty-foot steel boxes during the 1960s sparked a revolution in global commerce, enabling a more integrated transportation infrastructure in which containers could be transferred fluidly from truck to ship to train. Suddenly big waterfront warehouses for the storage of goods were obsolete, and a new class of gigantic container ships could accommodate ever-larger loads. These vessels were so big that they could no longer navigate the narrow docks lining the Thames. So between 1960 and 1980, nearly all of London’s docks shut down and a whole commercial sector that had sustained the region virtually disappeared. For hundreds of years, London had been a port city. Then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t. At least the air was clear. The word ‘smog’ had been invented in London, to describe the smoke from coal fires and factories, mingled with English fog, that often enshrouded the city. But new regulations on such fires, combined with the closure of so many factories, meant that suddenly London had clean air. By the time MI6 headquarters opened, the old Dickensian industrial city had been supplanted by a glistening new metropolis. London might not be a centre of shipping or manufacturing anymore, but it was reinventing itself as a financial capital. The waterfront was experiencing an astonishing revitalization: in 1988, a group of young British art students had converted a derelict warehouse in the Surrey Docks into a temporary gallery for an exhibition called Freeze. Cool restaurants soon followed, and eventually new housing and high-tech trading floors. Having shed any trace of its old grit or menace, London’s waterfront had become a sanitized playground for tourists and young professionals. In 2000, Bankside Power Station reopened as the Tate Modern museum. Battersea Power Station would eventually find new life as a shopping centre. ## Books with a similar feel - [Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar](https://uncovered.ink/read/chasing-the-boogeyman-richard-chizmar.md) - [The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-book-of-cold-cases-simone-st-james.md) - [King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby](https://uncovered.ink/read/king-of-ashes-s-a-cosby.md) - [The Country Road Murders by James Patterson & Mike Lupica](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-country-road-murders-james-patterson-and-mike-lupica.md) - [A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-drink-before-the-war-dennis-lehane.md) - [Innocent Blood by P. D. James](https://uncovered.ink/read/innocent-blood-p-d-james.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.