Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have mixed emotions about this novel by Jeffrey Archer. On the one hand it is an interesting concept; a young man and his mother flee Leningrad at the height of Cold War, and it’s a matter of chance where they wind up – the United States or the UK. On the other hand, it’s kind of sloppily written, so it does not exactly compel you to finish reading it. But the advantage is that you can put the book down and pick it up days later without really losing your place.

The structure of the novel is that it alternates between the two options available to the Karpenkos on the docks of Leningrad. We follow the parallel stories of Sasha Karpenko in Great Britain and Alex Karpenko in New York. It’s an interesting concept and it serves the author’s purpose fairly well, except for the occasional editing error. If you separate out the stories, this is vintage Archer: lots of local color, many characters and the cameos by historical figures. But there are also odd leaps in both stories that are not adequately explained, and despite all of the exposition in the early going, the conclusion to both stories seems rushed.

The novel is entertaining but clearly it’s not Archer’s best work. Many of his earlier book, such as First Among Equals, are much better in terms of the storytelling.