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When Andrew Rosenheim's first novel, Stillriver, appeared in 2004, his publisher, Random House, put all its might behind the advertising campaign. After all, Rosenheim, a former managing director of Penguin, should know a thing or two about writing page-turners.
But if that book wasn't exactly a publishing phenomenon, it was far from a disaster and earned praise for yoking emotional interest to a thriller plot.
His second novel, Keeping Secrets (Hutchinson, £17.99), covers similar ground. A no-nonsense American falls for a posh Brit, deserts Uncle Sam for Blighty and finds himself caught in a web of home-counties corruption. Something for the girls, the boys, the Yanks, the Brits.
In short, it's an upmarket airport novel, perfect fodder for a transatlantic flight, calculated to
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This transatlantic thriller is an upmarket airport novel but a good read all the same, says tim auld
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appeal to each nation's prejudices about the other. Our American hero, Renoir, grew up with a drunken, abusive mother, and as a child was witness to a shotgun killing in a backwoods farm; our British heroine, Kate, grew up on a ramshackle country estate among a family of eccentrics, fascist sympathisers and corrupt public-school bankers. Trailer trash meets the Mitfords.
It would all be pretty crude stuff - and yes, there is a discussion about whether Churchill v Hitler would have gone Winston's way without America's intervention (yawn) - if it wasn't so well constructed and cleanly written. There's even a running joke about TS Eliot's widow to keep English graduates happy in their economy seats. A canny piece of work, then, by a businessman who learned to balance the books. No more. No less. 
FIRST
POSTED APRIL 25, 2006
Poppy Shakespeare by Claire Allan
Double Fault by Lionel Shriver
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