Cell 8

The best-selling and award-winning journalist Anders Roslund and ex-criminal Börge Hellström are Sweden’s most acclaimed fiction duo. Roslund and Hellström combine inside knowledge of the brutal reality of criminal life with searing social criticism in complex, intelligent plots, propelling them to the forefront of the recent Scandinavian crime fiction sensation and winning them numerous awards, like the prestigious CWA International Dagger. Heirs apparent to masters of Scandinavian crime Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, “For crime with a political purpose, it’s hard to beat Cell 8 . . . where an outburst of violence on a late-night ferry heading for Sweden links to the fate of an American on death row,” said the Sunday Times. A cheap crooner by the name of John Schwarz earns his keep on a ferry between Sweden and Finland singing evergreens for drunken passengers. One night, he loses his temper with a man harassing women in the crowd, beating him unconscious. As drunken brawls are commonplace on the Baltic cruising ferries, no one raises an eyebrow. No one, that is, but Detective Ewert Grens. Concerned by the details of the case report, Grens can’t help but think someone capable of such violence must have a history of it. Suspicion turns to shock when Grens discovers that John Schwarz is not who he says he is, but instead John Meyer Frey—an American citizen from Marcusville, Ohio; shock because John Meyer Frey died on Death Row the previous year. This mystery initiates the most remarkable criminal investigation of Grens’s career, the reverberations of which will reach the highest tier of international politics, and blow the worldwide debate on the death penalty wide open.