The Serpent of Venice

Pocket, the sharp-tongued English fool last seen upending the court of King Lear, has landed in Venice — and someone very much wants him dead. Lured to a cellar under the pretense of tasting a rare wine, he is chained to a wall and left to die by a trio of powerful men whose profits from the coming Crusade he has been loudly threatening to spoil.

But Pocket does not die so easily. Freed by a strange creature from the deep, he sets about repaying the men who wronged him, and his scheming tangles him in the affairs of a Moorish general named Othello, a merchant with a pound of flesh at stake, and a clever heiress guarding her fortune behind a riddle of caskets.

Christopher Moore stitches together Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and a nod to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" into a bawdy, blood-slicked comedy of revenge. The second Pocket novel is filthy, clever, and irreverent — Shakespeare by way of a jester with a grudge.