This presents an interesting conundrum. Reagan’s stereotype was sweeping and offensive, but the woman at the center of it did drive a Cadillac and wear fur coats and take advantage of state programs intended to help the poor. What’s a writer to do? Levin makes no excuses for Taylor and instead rushes in, magnifying glass in hand, to the tornado that was her life.

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Taylor made a cameo on the national stage in 1974, after George Bliss of The Chicago Tribune wrote a series of articles about her case and headline writers dubbed her the “welfare queen.” “The Queen” contains so many strange events that it doesn’t come as a giant surprise that a detour into the tragic life of Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, ends with him killing his wife and then committing suicide.

Another author would have used the “welfare queen” as a jumping-off point to explore stereotypes, welfare politics and political rhetoric. Levin addresses all that, but his real goal is to put a face to Reagan’s bogeywoman, tracking every alias, every scam, every duped husband and every dodged arrest. He presents Linda Taylor not as a parable for anything grand, but as a singular American scoundrel who represented nothing but herself.

Levin first wrote about Taylor in a long article for Slate in 2013. In “The Queen,” he tracks her from her birth in 1926 in the wonderfully named Golddust, Tenn., to arrests in Seattle and Oakland, a possible murder in Chicago in 1975 and a nursing home in Tampa. And there’s much, much more.

Part of the fun of Levin’s book is burrowing inside his obsessive quest. He tracks down vintage court transcripts, old property deeds, marriage licenses, handwriting tests, yellowed police records, ex-husbands of former roommates. What emerges is a quite unsettling picture of a woman who in Levin’s telling seems to have no conscience and no morals, no loyalty to her own children or to any of her many, many husbands. Her crimes are so sprawling and confusing that at times she seems almost like a Keyser Söze master villain. There are hints of buying and selling children on the black market. There’s a sickly woman who winds up dead shortly after Taylor befriends her.

At various points, Taylor comes across as mentally ill, pathological in her lies and perhaps unable to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. At other times, Levin suggests that she seemed to know precisely which lever to pull, which name to use, which tragedy to invoke, in order to get what she wanted.

Although “the welfare queen” became a way to demonize black women, Taylor is such a phantom that even her race is a matter of debate. She was listed as white on the 1930 census, white and Mexican on a 1945 arrest report, and Hawaiian during a 1946 arrest. According to Levin, she was most likely the product of her white mother’s relationship with a black man. Whatever the case, Taylor spent most of her life changing her race, along with her name, as often as it suited her.