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This afternoon I shall go to my own funeral service before I watch them bury me under six feet of London clay.

A mysterious introduction to the unusual plot of a newly published novel in a fiction category that I hadn't heard of before, but is, it seems, an established genre: a medico-legal thriller. It also belongs to what I can with confidence assume to be a vanishingly small category: novels where the action takes place in Palmers Green.

The book in question - Hosting Andrew - is the debut novel by Enfield resident and retired solicitor John Lawrance. Some readers may have come across him in his former professional capacity, as he practised in Enfield and Potters Bar for nearly forty years, before starting out on his new career as a novelist at the tender age of 72.

John says that the key plot idea for the novel came to him as he woke from a minor operation a few years ago, "chilled at the sudden shutdown of life, then what seemed an instant turning on again, bringing the relief and joy of being alive".

The book was brought to my attention by a friend of John's, an Old Park Road resident who describes it as a "page turner". He's not the only one who thinks so. On the novel's Amazon page, one reader commented "There are not many books I found hard to put down, but this was one if them", while another wrote "Once I started reading I couldn’t stop! So many unexpected events and twists and really makes you think about who you are. Absolutely brilliant, well worth a read!"

The novel's main protagonist is a solicitor with an office in Palmers Green, so our little bit of the world gets mentioned quite a lot. However, the blurb on its cover describes Andrew Soulsby as a "provincial" solicitor, which I think might raise a few eyebrows among us north Londoners. And doubtless some will take exception at John Lawrance's confession, in his author bio, of being a masochistic supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

But there are worse problems than being a Spurs fan, and the plot twists in John's novel help explore some of them, "making you question what it means to have a soul, a sense of self".