After publishing a collection of stories in 2017 that were inspired by her father, Michaela Casey has returned to the shelves with a second book, “The Right Place at the Right Time,” which, like the first, is set in her native Dorchester. Though the novel is spread across 174 pages, it only covers one day in the lives of three fictional characters: Maggie Dodge, Billy Nee, and Eamon Lally.

“All three of them are having sort of like identity crises of very different sorts,” said Casey, who now lives in the foothills of western Maine. “Somehow, during the course of this day, the major events happen, and they all end up at the grocery store.”

The store, Eddie Jack’s Old Time Superette on Dorchester Avenue, is modeled on the old Dorchester Market, which is depicted on the book’s front cover. Casey, now 72, grew up near the store at her home on Columbia Road right next to St. Margaret parish’s church (today’s St. Teresa of Calcutta parish’s church). After completing grammar school at St. Margaret’s, she attended Girls’ Latin High School in Codman Square, which, before its closing in the mid-1970s, was a distinguished public school where Casey honed her writing skills.

With the school long gone and the radical changes in the church over the last 70 years, writing a book about her young self’s life offered a way for her to travel back in time and re-experience things the way they were.

“I don’t think of myself as a nostalgic person but somewhere, somehow in my subconscious, I think maybe I am,” Casey said in an interview with The Reporter. “I’m not nostalgic about the way Dorchester is now; I seem to be nostalgic about the way it was. And it’s not that way anymore, so maybe that’s why I left.”

Other parts of the book are reflections about her time in and around Dorchester.

“There is a major character in the book, the young woman whose mother has dementia. My mother suffered from dementia when we were still living in Dorchester,” said Casey. “I got to see that closer up than anybody would want to.”

The now-retired schoolteacher also called on some of her experiences at The Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown and the Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge while writing the book.

“During the summer I would dabble. I would write an article, and some of them got published but nothing really serious,” said Casey. “I really had yearned to do a book, but when you’re a teacher, there’s not a whole lot of time. When we retired, I had more time.”

While her first book was based on life with her father, this one derives in part from life with her husband Bob, who “told me this story of when he was in kindergarten, and it was December. School got out, and the school hired a new driver. He had like a dozen kids, but he was unfamiliar with the route.”

This single memory evolved into the description in the book of Billy Nee, the young grocery worker who helps his friend Joe by covering his afternoon van route. From there, it seemed, ideas spun around in her brain as quickly as the van’s wheels turned.

“It’s funny how just that little vignette, it just clicked in my head, and I just sort of elaborated on the idea, the concept, the scenario. It spawned characters and it’s funny how it works, but it worked.”

“The Right Place at the Right Time” is available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. Her readers should be pleased to know that another story, likely set in Dorchester yet again, is on its way.

“I’m very slow, so don’t hold your breath … and we’re coming up on the gardening season, so that slows me down a little bit more,” Casey said.