King John, the much-maligned English monarch, in this novel reaches out from the Other Side to browbeat his descendant William Ramsay into fixing up his reputation. Never mind that the king beat his nephew to death with his mailed fist, chained his thieving steward to a rampart in golden shackles, and starved Maud Briouze and her son to death.  These peccadilloes, he says, were forced on him in his role as responsible monarch.  He insists that Bill Ramsay write up some of the wonderful people who were his descendants, and thereby accomplish a major makeover of his ominously purple karma.   But the resulting vignettes about a sample of the king’s DNA heritage reveal other bad apples in the family tree.  Even worse, some of the descendants decide to get into the act themselves—causing an awful lot of trouble!