At the age of 17, John Frey sat on death row in an Ohio prison, convicted of killing his girlfriend. But the thirst for vengeance by the girl's father goes unsatisfied when Frey dies of a heart condition before he can be executed.
Fast-forward several years to Sweden where John Schwarz has been arrested for brutally assaulting a passenger on a ferry. DI Ewert Grens feels that something isn't quite right about Schwarz when he learns he's been living under a false identity. Grens is proven right when Schwarz's fingerprints turn up as a match for the supposedly dead John Frey.
A multilayered plot with a unique twist, CELL 8 is a gripping rendering of the disturbing repercussions of the death penalty.
Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens of THREE SECONDS
returns in a riveting mystery that centers on perhaps the
most controversial subject in the modern criminal justice
system: the death penalty.
In Ohio, seventeen-year-old John Meyer Frey rots on Death
Row for the brutal murder of his girlfriend. The victim's
father hungers for revenge, 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
harassing a woman, leaving the man in a coma. The Stockholm
police arrest Schwarz for aggravated assault, 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. Following his
intuition, Grens launches an investigation that spans from
Sweden to the United States and reveals a startling
connection between the Frey and Schwarz cases.
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