This case sprawls so far beyond Eleven Demons. I cut off the book with our flight from Bali in 2007 because it made a nice arc, it was complete and focused, and the story, at least in one sense, came to an end.

But our trials didn't end, and if anything they only became more incredible and difficult.

An organization of expatriates in Bali - bules is the Indonesan term - calling themselves "Made's Angels" became involved in both Bali and California to make sure we would never return to Bali.

My wife initiated a dramatic legal battle in California in which she eventually abandoned the children on the advice of her own attorney rather than give testimony about events in Indonesia.

And gradually, as investigations reached dead ends, and prosecutions were sidetracked, and court decisions piled up, the true motivators behind the events of Eleven Demons became visible as if demons through smoke.

All Indonesians know the term Mafia Hukum, or "Law Mafia," although few bules - floating along on the surface of Indonesian society, busy inventing a fantasy Bali of nightclubs and spas - have ever heard of it.

But I now heard of it because in Bali I had run up against the Mafia of the Gods.

When a threat of murder forces two Indonesian-American children and their father to flee the Island of the Gods, they face a heart-breaking betrayal, for behind it all, refusing to speak or meet with her family again, appears to be the boys’ own Balinese mother.

With $10 million in assets in hand, a plan over twenty years in the making, extensive backing from a Bali “Law Mafia,” and support even from an organisation of expatriates in Bali who call themselves the “Angels,” their mother’s willing sacrifice of her family seems a sure bet.

All goes slowly awry, however, as a desperate legal battle in California over the children’s fate forces their mother to escape to the protection of the Bali police rather than testify in the California court.

But Bali is no longer the safe haven of the Suharto years: Indonesia has changed. Democracy has replaced dictatorship, the rule of law is at war with corruption, and new forces in Jakarta are determined, slowly but inexorably, to open up the secret and shocking world of the Mafia of the Gods.

Publication 2014

Versions in English & Bahasa Indonesia

www.elevendemons.com