What links the old Central Mapping Authority, a crime writer from Melbourne and a long-term Bathurst life-on-the-land column?

Aoife Clifford says the answer - as is always the case in a mystery - is both surprising and simple.

Having put elements of her old home town into one of her previous novels without realising, the ex-Bathurst resident decided to be deliberate when it came time to write her latest book.

"When We Fall? was chosen as the Great Festival Read [for the Bathurst Writers' and Readers' Festival in 2022] the year it came out," she said.

"And unfortunately, COVID got in the way of our actual event, but we did an event on Zoom for it and what I found so amazing was that people had read it so closely and were able to point me to bits of Bathurst in the book that I had done subconsciously.

"That book was set in a coastal town, basically in Victoria, and yet little bits of Bathurst kept popping up for people.

"And they were right. When they pointed it out to me, I'd say of course that's why it's there. Because that's the way it's set up in Bathurst."

Having been "so delighted" to be the Great Festival Read (where festival attendees are encouraged to read the same book and then the author attends to discuss it), Ms Clifford said she made a conscious decision to base the fictional location of her new book, It Takes A Town, on Bathurst.

"So there's so much in there that people will recognise: the architecture, the streets, the way the parks look; the physical location of the school is just like MacKillop College, because I went there back in the day," she said.

But she couldn't rely on memories alone.

"Every day before I started writing, I would read the Western Advocate, just to see what was happening," she said.

"So, I got so much out of that. It was just lovely.

"The thing that I loved most was I really enjoyed John Seaman's Rural Notebook [column].

"I absolutely loved that and I got so much out of that. And I got quite invested in how the sheep prices were doing or what was the latest issue that the farmers were all worried about.

"There were so many familiar names that I would see. And people retiring off the land, having spent their whole life on the land. It was lovely.

"Not all of that is explicitly in the book, by any means, which is always the way with research, but it certainly informed my writing and how I approached the life of this town [the fictional town] that has a strong farm element as well as what's happening in the town itself.

"It was a lovely thing to do and would really get me in the mood for writing about my town."

On top of that, she said she would email friends in Bathurst to ask them what birds were on their property or "what's happening with the harvest" or what the river was looking like.

"And I got lots of information from them as well and some of that directly did go into the book," she said.

In It Takes A Town, which is Ms Clifford's fourth book, the glamorous resident of a country town is found dead at the bottom of the stairs after a terrible storm.

It looks at first to be a simple accident, but anonymous letters are discovered that suggest otherwise - and then a teenager suddenly disappears.

Ms Clifford said there's a town element in each of her books.

"With city people, there's an assumption that, oh, you're writing about another small town, they're all the same.

"And part of it is, no, actually, they're completely different.

"You would never say, for example, that Sydney and Melbourne are the same place.

"And small towns are like that too.

"I wanted to buck, a bit, the small town thing. Because Bathurst isn't a small town. Bathurst is like a regional centre.

"Yet, when you say, oh, I come from Bathurst in NSW, someone, especially in Victoria, who might not know Bathurst very well, will go, oh, small town.

"And you'll go, actually, no, pretty large place, to be honest. And it's got a lot of things that other towns don't have - like, say, the education sector; what Charles Sturt brings to the town. Or when you list all the schools, there's a lot of schools in Bathurst; there's a whole industry there.

"But people make assumptions.

"So I like challenging people's preconceptions of a place, where Bathurst is large enough that not everybody does know everybody."

Ms Clifford said she "really wanted to write a book about community".

"What is quite common in crime fiction is you have a town in despair: it's like a Gothic horror of a town.

"Whereas in this one, I wanted to have a place where you can tell it's a good place to live.

"Yep, there's a murder-mystery to be sorted out, but it's a place where I especially wanted it to be funny, to have people whose lives are good lives, that different people would have different reactions to getting caught up in a murder-mystery.

"They were some of my concerns going in that I enjoyed exploring."

Ms Clifford - a prize-winning author who has been long-listed for the Australian Industry General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction - grew up in Bathurst before leaving for the Australian National University in Canberra, where she studied law.

Her parents came to Australia from Ireland after her surveyor father had his attention drawn to a job being advertised for the Central Mapping Authority on the other side of the world.

"Those were the days when it [the Central Mapping Authority] was in Sydney," she said.

"We came [to Australia] and we were in a public tower block in Sydney."

When the then-state government moved the Central Mapping Authority to Bathurst as part of a policy of decentralisation, Ms Clifford and her family suddenly found themselves on the other side of the Blue Mountains.

"You sort of think [about how] you had a completely different life as a result of that government policy," she said.

"But I can also see, whenever they talk about decentralisation and let's move departments again, how big an ask that is and how many people maybe just stayed in Sydney."

All these years later, the decentralisation policy is still paying dividends: it's given Bathurst a claim to a prize-winning author and it's given It Takes A Town its affectionate, carefully drawn details.