In Ohio, seventeen-year-old John Meyer Frey rots on Death Row for the brutal murder of his girlfriend. When Frey unexpectedly dies, 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 him in a coma. The police arrest Schwarz for aggravated assault, but when Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens learns that the assailant has been living in Sweden under a false identity, he launches an investigation that spans from Sweden to the United States and reveals a startling connection between the Frey and Schwarz case.