Claude Cueni – THE GREAT GAME(DAS GROSSE SPIEL)
Heyne, Munich: August 2006
448 pages,

THE GREAT GAME tells the true story of a man who walked the thin line between reason and passion.

Claude Cueni’s epic historical novel tells the story of John Law, the most glamorous man of his time. A legendary lover, a brilliant mathematician and a gambler, John Law put aside the gambling cards to test his theories on an entire country.

Born in Edinburgh in 1671, John Law lost his father’s inheritance as a young man at the gambling table. Good-looking, charming and adventurous, many women fell victims to his power of seduction until, finally, their husbands cheered when John Law killed a man in a duel and had to leave England for Europe. During his travels across a continent that has been destroyed by decades of war, John Law came up with a system that allowed the dwindling resources of metal money to be replaced with paper. But Louis XIV saw no merit in the wild ideas of that young Scottish protestant. But then the Sun King died and his decadent successor, the Duke of Orleans, became Prince Regent. Impressed by modern experiments, the Duke couldn’t resist the idea of reducing France’s enormous debts by simply running a printing machine. He made John Law Minister of Finance who then founded the Banque Royale and tested his „system“ on an entire population: paper money was invented, the trade exploded, the masses turned rich over night, and John Law became the world’s first „millionaire“, the wealthiest man of his time. The Duke of Orleans, however, couldn’t get enough of a good thing. Neglecting his banker’s advice, he printed money to meet the financial demands of his extravagant way of living. The first new economy collapsed, the bubble burst, the people were quick to blame one man: John Law.

Rich in historic details, fast paced and erotically charged, THE GREAT GAME is the everything that readers of good historical novels are looking for.

Claude Cueni has written crime series for German TV, plays, mystery novels and the novel CAESAR’S DRUID that became a bestseller in Germany, Italy and Spain. He lives near Basel with his wife and son. His website is: www.cueni.ch