A solid, fun, quick read. ( )

An intriguing premise, but one that ultimately doesn't fully live up to its potential. Three and a half stars for effort, three for execution.

Mickey Wade has just lost his job as a newspaper reporter. Unable to keep his apartment, he accepts his mother's suggestion that he move into his grandfather's apartment. (Mickey's grandfather was just admitted to the hospital.) After a drunken binge he goes looking through his grandad's medicine cabinet and takes four pills from an old Tylenol bottle. But the pills instead send Mickey back to the past, to the year he was born. He meets the boy downstairs who will grow up to ultimately murder Mickey's father. Like I said, this was an intriguing premise, and although I enjoyed the book, Mickey wasn't ever fully sympathetic to me. He seemed to drink a lot, and the fantastical premise of time travel struck Mickey as more of a burden than a thrill. ( )

Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski is set in a specific neighborhood of Philadelphia, one that in the present has fallen into disrepair but was a thriving working class neighborhood in the 1970s. The buildings though are rent controlled, and down on his luck Mickey Wade has moved into his grandfather's apartment while the old man is in the hospital.

And while he's there, he stumbles upon the ability to travel back in time to his childhood, back before his father is brutally murdered by a local kid, now locked up in a nearby institute. So questions arise: is this time travel real? Can anything be done with it? Is it bad for Mike's health?

What unfolds is a murder mystery and time travel story that flips between the past and the present. It's thematically similar to Clannad and Clannad After Story, the U.S. version of Life on Mars (minus the last episode), and The X-Files. It's not as hardcore a time travel story as The Man Who Folded Himself or The Man in the Empty Suit. ( )

An excellent try-to-wrap-your-head-around-this-time-travel story, complete with a whodunit and a surprise ending. Just when you think you've got it figured out, the author throws another twist in the story.
And make sure to read the background of this story and how it came to be published. Almost as fascinating as the story itself!
Highly recommended. ( )

Expiration Date was the first book written by Duane Swierczynski I have ever read. It will not be the last. Expiration Date was well written, fast paced, suspenseful, entertaining and just plain fun to read. From the first page until the last, I could hardly stand to put this book down. ( )