In August of 1838, in the middle of a devastating civil war, a grotesque figure arrived with the mail coach at Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage town in the North-West of Spain. He was a former Swiss mercenary, who thirty years previously had heard a rumour about a massive hoard of church plate buried by the soldiers of Marshal Ney. A fantasy? A daydream? Just one of the many hollow legends of hidden gold that abound in Spain? Perhaps so. But, astonishingly, the Swiss vagrant did not come on his own errand. He came sponsored by Spain's savvy Minister of Finance, Don Alejandro Mon, who for some shadowy reason of his own lent credence to the tale. Like an historical Sherlock Holmes, Peter Missler traces the true tale of Benedict Mol, the treasure hunter, through the mists of time and a smoke-screen of cover-stories. It is a fascinating saga which takes us into Portugal with the looting French invaders, into the wildest mountains of Northern Spain with the brilliant polyglot George Borrow, and - by the hand of Mol - into the darkest nooks and corners of a hospital for syphilitics. No treasure was ever found, either in the first attempt, which toppled the government, or in the second one, which ended with the murder of two innocent peasants. Therefore, quite possibly, Ney's treasure still lies waiting elsewhere in a Santiago park...

In August of 1838, in the middle of a devastating civil war, a grotesque figure arrived with the mail coach at Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage town in the North-West of Spain. He was a former Swiss mercenary, who thirty years previously had heard a rumour about a massive hoard of church plate buried by the soldiers of Marshal Ney. A fantasy? A daydream? Just one of the many hollow legends of hidden gold that abound in Spain? Perhaps so. But, astonishingly, the Swiss vagrant did not come on his own errand. He came sponsored by Spain's savvy Minister of Finance, Don Alejandro Mon, who for some shadowy reason of his own lent credence to the tale. Like an historical Sherlock Holmes, Peter Missler traces the true tale of Benedict Mol, the treasure hunter, through the mists of time and a smoke-screen of cover-stories. It is a fascinating saga which takes us into Portugal with the looting French invaders, into the wildest mountains of Northern Spain with the brilliant polyglot George Borrow, and - by the hand of Mol - into the darkest nooks and corners of a hospital for syphilitics. No treasure was ever found, either in the first attempt, which toppled the government, or in the second one, which ended with the murder of two innocent peasants. Therefore, quite possibly, Ney's treasure still lies waiting elsewhere in a Santiago park...

In 1837 George Borrow, the brilliant polyglot and future author of best-sellers, arrived in Madrid as agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society with the assignment to print and distribute a Protestant version of the New Testament in a staunchly Catholic land. In the first months of the year he saw through to press an edition of no fewer than 5,000 copies. Then he spent the next three years selling the book, against tremendous opposition from the Catholic Church and hostile conservative authorities, in all the nooks and corners of the land, to all classes of Spanish society, in big cities and in tiny villages. Thrice imprisoned, a dozen times nearly killed by bandits, firing-squad, disease or accident, Borrow persisted where saner men would soon have yielded. When at last he returned to England, the greater part of his 'Scio New Testament' had been duly sold to noblemen, donkey-drivers and jailbirds, to 'muleteers, carmen, and contrabandistas', to city bourgeois and intellectuals craving for a look at Europe's most fundamental text. A Daring Game does not repeat the whole story of Borrow's adventures as told in his sensational 1843 travelogue 'The Bible in Spain'. Instead, it investigates the conditions and circumstances under which Borrow's New Testament was produced and distributed, and for the first time in two centuries calculates the exact numbers of sales attained by a bookseller of genius in a land plagued by war, pestilence, ignorance and hatred.