Does one get a chance to live two lives…..maybe and maybe not. John Meyer Frey is on death row in Marcusville, Ohio waiting to be executed for the murder of his 16 year old girlfriend, Elizabeth Finnegan. For almost a decade Edward Finnegan has waited for some closure for the murder of his daughter. And so starts the latest thriller from Swedish award winning authors Anders Roslund & Borge Hellstrom.
On death row, one is known by his cell number and there is nothing to do but to count the seconds, minutes and hours until you are put to death. Frey makes only one friend in prison, the man in the next cell , a 65 year old African-American who will die before Frey. The only other person having any compassion for Frey is senior prison guard, Vernon Eriksen. And then a strange thing occurs……Frey collapses and dies before he is executed.
Six years later, while entertaining on a tourist ferry, John Schwarz, a singer for the band has an altercation with a patron on the boat. A drunken tourist is harassing a young woman and John intercedes by violently kicking the man in the face. The injuries are severe enough so that Schwarz is taken into custody and held in jail in Stockholm. As the Swedish police try to identify the singer, who has a Canadian passport, a strange thing comes to the surface. John Schwarz does not exist; the fingerprints and passport are for someone else.
Now the case is thrown into the lap of irascible Detective Superintendent, Ewert Grens and his two able assistants, Mariana Hermansson and Sven Sundkvist. Readers of their first best seller, Three Seconds, will well remember the team. (See the blog entry for Three Seconds here.) From then on it is a race to put the pieces of the puzzle together because we know – or think we know – that John Meyer Frey died back in Ohio. And is it possible that Frey is really innocent ?? Roslund and Hellstrom will capture your attention as they did in Three Seconds and you won’t put this down until you complete this terrific book.
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Tags: Death Penalty, International Fiction, Revenge, Stephen B.'s Picks, Thriller
