Mandragora by H.D. Greaves
A ribald and irreverent tale from the Italian renaissance - Add a conniving servant and his amoral master; a murderous priest and his equally homicidal sidekick; an odious mother-in-law; a beautiful but barren wife wed to an ancient attorney; and a potion brewed from the root of the Mandragora, a plant alleged to help women conceive, and you have a prescription for pandemonium, especially when Mandragora (known in less reputable circles as “God’s Little Joke”), possesses a fatal flaw: after a woman drinks the potion, her body becomes a temple of poison. The first man to have sex with her will be dead in seven days. What's a man to do? Based on Niccolo Machiavelli’s play, The Mandrake , this is a tongue-in-check story of a rake desperate to sleep with a certain woman, a husband desperate for a child, and a wife desperate for control of her own life. The heart of the novel lies in the question, “Does the end, when a noble one, justify the means, however wicked?” The story starts with...