Confidence Men

A winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Margalit Fox trained as a linguist and was a senior writer at The New York Times. As a former member of the newspaper's celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. She has written three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defence, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, and lives in Manhattan with her husband, writer and critic George Robinson.

Fox, a former senior obituary writer for The New York Times and the author of three previous books, unspools Jones and Hill's delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine, gradually leading from Yozgad to freedom by way of secret codes, a hidden camera, buried clues, fake suicides and a lot of ingenious mumbo jumbo. At moments, The Confidence Men has the high gloss of a story polished through years of telling and retelling