I just heard that Lolly Winston (”Good Grief”) can’t make this weekend’s big author festival, put on by the Contra Costa County library system. Instead, someone very intriguing to me has graciously stepped up to the plate. She’s Michelle Richmond, author of “The Year of Fog.” (That’s her, below, at a reading.)

 I  blogged about this book a long time ago … it arrived on my desk and I did the first page test (if it grabs me, I keep reading) and it DID grab me, and I kept reading it for most of the afternoon. (Yep, I sometimes get to read on the job. I love my job.) The reason I may not have been able to put it down is because it involves a missing child, and I really really really hate books about missing or ill (or dead) children. I think I wanted to find out if the child ever got found. And I’m not telling.

But the book so perfectly captures San Francisco. It’s fun to read a book that takes place where you live (or lived, in my case). It’s hard for an author because someone is always sure to complain that they got the name of the barbershop wrong, or the restaurant is on the OTHER side of the street. (Once I read a book about San Francisco that had the characters paying the Bay Bridge toll on the city side, instead of the Oakland side, and I felt I couldn’t trust another word of the rest of the book.)  

But Michelle lives in the area, so she’s pretty sure of what she is writing about. And I lived in The City for  15 years, and didn’t find anything wrong. “The Year of Fog” is now is paperback, and Michelle is writing a new book, “No One You Know.”

For the Contra Costa County Library Reading Festival, Michelle will be at Ygnacio Valley Library at 1 p.m. I can’t be there (my daughter’s Senior Ball is that day, I’ll be taking pictures like a madwoman) but I have a feeling Michelle and I will be meeting someday soon. She’s good.