In offering The Book of Mormon, with its multitudes of interacting characters, scores of place names and geographical descriptions, and complicated story and chronology, a fraud would have exposed Joseph Smith to a host of risks.     Additionally, there’s the question of what price a prophet and religion-builder would be willing to pay. In Joseph’s case, the price entailed seemingly endless lawsuits, mockery and persecution, tarring and feathering, substantial periods of imprisonment, being driven from state to state, watching friends and family suffer on account of his claims and, in the end, going — apparently quite consciously — to violent death at the hands of a mob.