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DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI is the author of The Wheelman, The Blonde, and Severance Package and writes for Marvel Comics. He lives in Philadelphia.

"Recently unemployed journalist Mickey Wade lucked into a rent-free apartment - his sick grandfather's place. The only problem: it's in a lousy neighborhood - the one where Mickey grew up, in fact. The one he was so desperate to escape." "But now he's back. Dead broke. And just when he thinks he's reached rock bottom, Mickey wakes up in the past. Literally." "At first he thinks it's a dream. All of the stores he remembered from his childhood, the cars, the rumble of the elevated train. But as he digs deeper into the past, searching for answers about the grandfather he hardly knows, Mickey meets the twelve-year-old kid who lives in the apartment below." The kid who will grow up to someday murder Mickey's father.

Publishers Weekly

In this workmanlike time travel thriller from Swierczynski (Severance Package), 37-year-old Mickey Wade, a struggling journalist who’s lost his job with an alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City News, accepts his mother’s suggestion to move into his grandfather’s apartment in the city’s seedy Frankford neighborhood. After popping some long-expired Tylenols for a hangover, Wade is transported back to February 22, 1972, the day he was born. Wade’s time-traveling self proves vulnerable to light, as shown by his losing two fingers. On returning to the present, Wade finds those fingers restored but without feeling. Subsequent deliberate trips into the past give Wade some background on the great trauma of his life, the apparently motiveless stabbing murder of his father, a musician known as the Human Jukebox. Predictable complications follow from Wade’s efforts to prevent the killing. This one will appeal mainly to Swierczynski fans. (Mar.)