A journalist reconstructs the brazen exploits of two World War I prisoners of war who faked mental illness to escape from "the Alcatraz of its day." Situated amid the barren Anatolian mountains, Turkey's Yozgad prison camp was so remote that no barbed wire surrounded it; authorities considered it "escape-proof." The world learned otherwise from an outlandish plot devised by Elias Henry Jones, an Oxford-educated British officer taken prisoner when his country surrendered after the siege of Kut-al-Amara, which had left his compatriots foraging desperately for food: "Hedgehog fried in axle grease was surprisingly palatable. Stray dogs found their way onto the table." Jones teamed with Cedric Waters Hill, a downed Australian pilot whose earlier work as a magician helped the pair refine an ingenious scheme. They used a handmade Ouija board, fake seances, and other types of "spooking" to persuade the camp commandant that he could find gold buried at Yozgad if they left the camp to learn its location from distant "spirits." After he agreed, they feigned madness in a Constantinople insane asylum and sought repatriation for medical reasons. Fox tells a brisk story filled with colorful background on the magic, spiritualism, and psychiatry of the day. What's unclear is why Jones and Hill went to such extraordinary lengths to escape when, for prisoners, they passed the time in what Jones described in his memoir as "comparative ease." They lived in houses with gardens; they could receive mail; and their Ottoman captors paid salaries to British officers. While other POWs' narratives have shown that captives' reasons for escaping can range from a desire to avoid torture to a will to bear witness to prison horrors, Fox provides little compelling evidence that such factors drove her heroes. Jones and Hill showed remarkable daring, but their motives remain elusive in a tale that, despite its title, is more plot- than character-driven. The brisk true story of a jailbreak so bizarre it might rate an entry in Ripley's Believe It or Not! Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense), a former obituary writer for the New York Times, recounts in this marvelous history how two British army officers in WWI orchestrated "the most singular prison break ever recorded." Seeking to alleviate the monotony of life at the remote Yozgad prison camp in Turkey, British POWs built a Ouija board from salvaged materials. After numerous failed attempts to raise a spirit, Elias Henry Jones, "the Oxford-educated son of a British lord," began manipulating the board, convincing his compatriots that they were conversing with the dead. Intended merely as a lark, Jones's game became a more serious affair when a Turkish officer asked if the board could help him find a buried treasure. Jones partnered with Cedric Waters Hill, an Australian pilot and "master magician," to devise a complex scheme to trick the camp commandant into sending them to Constantinople, where they spent six months feigning madness in an insane asylum before being repatriated. Fox enriches her account with intriguing deep dives into the psychology of "coercive persuasion," the mechanics of confidence games, and the history of spiritualism in the U.S. and England. Readers will be mesmerized by this rich and rewarding tale. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman. (June)

Fox, author of two nonfiction jewels, The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013) and Conan Doyle for the Defense (2018), tells the story of the most amazing prison escape you've probably never heard of. It was at the tail end of the Great War, and two British soldiers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, were among the prisoners at Yozgad, a POW camp in what is now called Turkey. Concocting a story about hidden treasure, and using a Quija board to con the guards into thinking they were speaking to the dead, Jones and Hill did what thousands of prisoners have only dreamed of doing: they got away. It truly is a remarkable story, and it's about much more than the mechanics of a prison break; it's also about two men who were determined to do the impossible. Fox is an excellent storyteller; she writes about real events as though they were the stuff of fiction, bringing the people to vivid life and making the reader feel as though they are part of the story. Another fine true story from an outstanding writer.

With this latest work, Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense) presents a World War I story of two British officers from different sides of the world--Welsh lawyer Harry Jones and Australian magician Cedric Hill--who collaborated to escape from a Turkish POW camp, using deception, a handcrafted Ouija board, and an insanity plea which sent them to the relative safety of an asylum. The case of the Yazgod prison escapees was distinctive because they employed not weapons or tunnels but ingenuity, by beguiling commandants with a fanciful search for hidden treasure and the power of deception. This well-researched book, based in part on the men's memoirs, gives considerable context to the 20th-century Anglo revival of spiritualism and confidence manipulation, and makes comparisons with the coercive persuasion of later cult leaders and demagogues. It includes photographs of Jones and Hill throughout their careers, along with extensive notes and a bibliography for further research. VERDICT Fans of military history will appreciate this book's attention to the Ottoman side of the war; general readers will learn much about the influence of mass psychology. Like Fox's previous works, this latest is a page-turner.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC