EXPIRY DATE

Expiry Date
By David Michie
448 pages
ISBN: 0-7515-3265-7
Time Warner Paperbacks
December, 2003
£ 6.99 for U.K., $9.99 for Canada

“’Very simply, our life spans are genetically determined. Each of us has what you might call an expiry date written into our DNA. All I’m trying to do is punch that date back. But it’s still,’ she felt obliged to emphasize, ‘very early days.’ The last thing she wanted was to have Cornelia ask her for her own personal supply.”

Lorna Reid has possibly found a drug that can delay your death, maybe another forty to fifty years. To test this miraculous find, she asks progeria patients to be the experiment with the drug known as NP3. Progeria is the unfortunate aging disease that afflicts many youngsters and greatly reduces their life span so that these children usually die in their teens or early twenties.

Anytime you experiment on humans, there are risks. Lorna did not anticipate though the risks of murder. What industry would want to keep this drug from being successful? Would medical insurance see this as a blessing or a curse? By extending people’ natural life, would there be more medical problems such as hip replacements, brittle bones, cataracts, etc…? Wouldn’t the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

When a young progeria boy drowns, this boy’s father refuses to believe it to be an accident. The father knows that the boy would not have left his wheelchair to get near the water. So how did this happen? By pursuing the explanation, you begin to wonder is this the father’s guilt for not watching the boy closer or was the boy deliberately killed?

Dr. Reid has difficulty finding enough progeria victims for the drug to be adequately experienced, but does happen to find that this drug was given to a group of prisoners, all of which seemed to now be deceased, or could there be anyone still alive that would know about this event? What even seems stranger is that as Lorna finds anyone who might have known about the test with the prisoners that tend to die before she can ask them any further questions?

What makes a science fiction mystery a thriller? The answer is simply when it could possibly be real. The research within the medical science field both in the past and with the genetic work of today, make this book all too possible. The pace and the believable characters make this book a thrilling reading experience.

David Michie was born in South Africa to Scottish parents, has lived in London, visited America, and has married an Australian. He doesn’t like London winters so for that part of the year, they live in Australia. Expiry Date is his third novel.