Everyone knows the tale of brave Laura De Marco, Redemptrix of Voltagetown, heroine of the War of Reunification. How she crossed miles of snowy terrain under the guise of taking her cow to market to deliver news of a Stater ambush to Major-General Sir Isaac Badger. Her crucial intelligence of that decisive battle finally brought the United Kingdom of America back under Crown rule after 87 long years.

But the truth is not so simple.

Now, for the first time, the true story of Lady Laura and Major-General Badger is told. Her own words are faithfully reproduced, a century after her death and long suppressed, from the personal diary of the rogue Vice-Regal Archivist James Hansom to a fantastic collection of antiques in Death Valley and even top secret correspondence from the Queen herself. This book tells the shocking and sordid truth about the formation of our "great" empire.

This is the history the False Queen doesn't want you to know.

Terri Favro's writing is inspired by a lifelong obsession with science fiction, comic books, robots, steampunk, industrial history, and Greek and Roman myths. Her work has appeared on the Globe & Mail 100 Books of the Year list, Quill & Quire recommended books, CBC Books Top 10 Books of the Year, the shortlist for the Sunburst Prize for Excellence in Canada Literature of the Fantastic, and the longlist for CBC Canada Reads. A finalist for the CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and winner of the Accenti Prize and the Ken Klonsky-Quattro Novella Prize, Terri's essays and short fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Clockwork Canada Steampunk Fiction, On Spec, The Quarantine Review, Prism, Broken Pencil, Grain, Room, Humber Literary Review, Hamilton Review of Books, Riddle Fence, Untethered, and Voices from the FOLD, the publication of the Festival of Literary Diversity. Raised in the Niagara region, Terri now lives in Toronto and blogs at terrifavro.ca