Convicted of brutally murdering his girlfriend, seventeen-year-old John Meyer Frey marks time in an Ohio maximum security prison, awaiting execution. For nearly a decade, the victim’s father has hungered for Frey’s death, while a prison guard is torn by compassion for the young man. When Frey unexpectedly dies of heart disease before he either receives his just punishment or achieves redemption, the wheels of justice grind to a halt. Six years later, on a ferry between Finland and Sweden, a singer named John Schwarz viciously attacks a drunken lout, leaving the man in a coma. The Stockholm police arrest Schwarz and assign Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens to the seemingly straightforward assault case. But when Grens learns that the assailant has been living in Sweden under a false identity, he begins to suspect that something darker and more complex underlies the incident.
