Paul Ruel was exiled to the Mountains to fade quietly from view. His bosses expected him to quit. Instead, he starts pulling at a thread in an old case — a woman in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit — and the thread leads somewhere people in Katoomba don’t want him to go.

Paul starts dating Bella’s daughter Siobhan. Then he turns to Bella for professional help. She should have known better …

Set against the fog and cold of a Blue Mountains winter, The Problem with Murder is a crime novel about two people who are better together than they have any right to be.

And then Paul disappears. 

It’s left to his new friend Bella Greaves to find him. She’s a newspaper editor, not a detective. But she’s stubborn and smart, and knows that Katoomba is not always as charming as the tourist board would like.

Then a petty criminal accuses the priest of abusing him years ago. Paul Ruel finds himself investigating a man many regard as a saint, and the town divides.

He seeks help from his friend Bella Greaves, but she has her own problems: she’s turned 60 and her job at the newspaper is under threat.  The Mountains in winter are no place to feel uncertain about your future.

Bella Greaves, who knew Serena years ago when she was a drug addict, finds herself drawn in. Serena has discovered something about her own past, connected to the murders of gay men in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in the 1980s. It seems that unwittingly she was responsible for something terrible back then. As Bella searches for her old friend, she wonders how anyone would react to learning such a thing, decades later.

Then a death occurs and events take an unusual turn.

Some of the story, which includes a crisis in the affair between Paul and Bella’s daughter Siobhan, occurs in the magnificent Everglades Gardens at Leura.

Which of these categories certain stories fall into is a subject of heated discussion with Barry, barman of the Orphan Hotel frequented by Bella and Paul.

Tall Stories is a collection of Bella’s Memory Lane columns, as imagined by author Michael Duffy. Together they form a very lively history of the Blue Mountains, where fact is often just as entertaining as the fiction.