A bottle of blood is found buried in a wombat hole, but where is the body? Is a suburban couple paying the babysitter with freshly stolen money? Can a lucky leech outsmart a brazen burglar? Match wits with real life investigators to answer these questions, and also discover how nine of Western Australia’s most wanted criminals escaped from Perth’s Supreme Court in broad daylight; why an Adelaide wife sent her husband’s privates to a fiery end; and how a Melbourne woman convinced high-level professionals to raise her stolen family at a cult in Eildon — undetected — for over twenty years. Cunning crims, cruel cults and common crackpots abound in these 12 fascinating true tales from the badlands of contemporary Australia. Journalist Liam Houlihan goes behind the headlines to prove truth is not only stranger than fiction but also more colourful, more baffling and more twisted. Liam Houlihan is an award-winning journalist and former lawyer. He has reported from New York (for the NY Post), Washington, DC (including a stint in the White House press pool), from Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami, and has trailed Mick Gatto’s pursuit of missing Opes Prime money in Singapore. As a Crime Reporter with the Sunday Herald Sun, his police and underworld exclusives were regularly syndicated by other media around the country. He is currently Chief of Staff at the Sunday Herald Sun. Liam was great fun to talk to, and we covered everything from witnessing George W. Bush invent the term "chicken growers", through Adelaide being "the city of shallow graves", to the way in which he picked the stories for this book. These are great stories, and this is a fun interview!