This is a collection of true-life tall tales about a rookie reporter's adventures in Canada's still-very-wild West. The night Mark Leiren-Young drove into Williams Lake, British Columbia, in 1985 to work as a reporter for the venerable Williams Lake Tribune, he arrived on the scene of an armed robbery. And that was before things got weird. For a 21-year-old from Vancouver, a stint in the legendary Cariboo town was a trip to another world and another era. From the explosive opening, where Mark finds himself in a courtroom just a few feet away from a defendant with a bomb strapped to his chest, to the case of a plane without a pilot that crashed, "Never Shoot a Stampede Queen" is an unforgettable comic memoir of a city boy learning about -- and learning to love -- life in a cowboy town.