Charlie Asher, a neurotic and anxious hypochondriac who hates change, confronts the challenges of being a widower and a single parent when his wife dies of a freak medical condition on the day his new daughter, Sophie, is born.

Pocket, the king's fool, and his simpleton apprentice, Drool, devise a way to clean up King Lear's mistakes with his kingdom, family, and fortune, only to learn about their own heritage amid murder, mistaken identities, ghostly appearances, and conniving daughters.

Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone -- or something -- is stealing them and no one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death Merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else. He's trapped in the body of a fourteen-inch-tall "meat" waiting for his Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey, to find him...

"San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy 'Two Toes' Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie's Coffee Irregulars, a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir, are on the hustle: they're trying to open a driving school for Chinatown residents; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad; all while Sammy's girlfriend,...