The idea for Laura’s debut novel, More Than Just a Game, came about purely by chance. Laura was flipping channels when she landed on an episode of What History Forgot and heard the announcer say: “Stay tuned to learn how Monopoly was used to help Allied POWs escape during WWII.”

She stayed tuned and was introduced to a world that sounded more like fiction — something out of Hogan’s Heroes or a James Bond film — but was entirely real.

The more she learned, the more fascinated she became with the ingenuity of MI9, the secret British organization that used silk maps, coded letters, and tools hidden in playing cards, shoelaces, and Monopoly boards to help prisoners escape. That research soon led her to the resistance networks of occupied France, where people like Resistance hero Nancy Wake risked everything to guide escapees across the Pyrenees—often with nothing but a smuggled map and a hidden compass.

She wanted to bring that world to life—to show the patriotism and quiet courage of the people who made escape possible: intelligence officers, printers, factory workers, smugglers, and guides working together in an underground machine of escape.

More Than Just a Game tells that story through the lens of two sisters—one working with MI9 in London, the other surviving under an alias in France—both risking everything for the war and for each other.