Muswell Hill's village-like atmosphere has proved the perfect environment to transform criminal defence lawyer Francesca Weisman into a budding novelist.

Her debut, Nowhere's Child, published by Penguin Books, intertwines three stories to solve a mystery surrounding the discovery of the body of an up-and-coming model in a gutter.

"At first they are quite disparate narratives," she said. "As the three stories merge and become intertwined, you see how all three stories interlock. When their paths meet, the murder mystery is solved.

"I started to write when I was a child. I've always written in my spare time. I enjoyed writing stories that had a puzzle or mystery. Once I was a lawyer, I started to use some of the material that I had. Eventually some of that got put into a first novel."

The detective assigned to the case discovers that the woman, a public figure, has no traceable past.

The story jumps to Kit, a boy with Asperger's Syndrome who grew up never knowing his father and becomes obsessed with finding him.

And finally to Miranda and Mark, two teenagers who were raised in a care home and want to find out who they are and where they came from.

The story of Kit, the bullied autistic child, was inspired by her brother, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome.

"When I was growing up with my brother, people weren't really aware of it," she said. "That was something dear to my heart."

For the past year, she has lived in Osier Crescent, Muswell Hill, and before that she lived in Crouch End. While neither location features in her novel, she believes Muswell Hill is the perfect place to become a writer.

"That sense of being away from things, part of a separate village you can just get lost in your own thoughts," she said.