Expiration Date

Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski

I generally like Duane Swierczynski’s work. I haven’t given all of his books high ratings, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading each of the four I read before this one. But Expiration Date was not enjoyable at all. It was an urban version of Tree of Life, full of nostalgia for the days before white flight left the cities considerably darker than they’d previously been. That’s not my thing.

The story itself wasn’t too bad, but there were too many places where I shook my head and said, “This is just stupid.” The time-travelling mechanism didn’t do it for me. Really, who takes Tylenol that’s been expired for 27 years? Also, the protagonist was a reporter in the city where he grew up, the city where his father was killed in an incident for which no arrests were made, and yet he never dug into his father’s death? I don’t buy that. No. And Meghan the Mary Sue was way too much.

I didn’t enjoy this at all.

D+