Police Commissioner Ewert Grens is a hard man and hasn’t many friends among his colleagues in the Stockholm police. Every little thing for him is always a personal matter. Like when he sees a man on the line for complaints who has a bleeding ear and one pupil larger than the other. It seems like a routine matter: the usual drunken brawl on the ferry that goes between Sweden and Finland, and whoever lands goes to the police department to make a formal complaint. But for Grens it becomes something more right away: those eyes, the bleeding ear, like his Anni, who’s been vegetating for twenty-five years in a hospital she’s never going to leave. For the Commissioner and his collaborators Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson this is the beginning of more complicated and delicate investigation than the usual. Because the aggressor, a certain John Schwarz, doesn’t really exist, or rather his fingerprints correspond to an American citizen’s called John Meyer Frey, who died from a serious heart disease in the death row of an Ohio prison while he was waiting to be executed. Frey, accused of the brutal homicide of his fiancée had always declared his innocence, but neither the circumstantial evidence nor his being a minor had saved him from being condemned to death. Can they be the same person? John Meyer Frey is or was really a murderer? As Grens puts back together the fragments of an incredible story, the United States and the father of the murdered girl demand to have back that prisoner who risks becoming a deadly slap in the face for their penal system. The «strange couple» of Swedish crime stories – Roslund a famous TV journalist, Hellström an ex-jailbird who assists former prisoners – construct this third novel on the individual and society’s desire for revenge, and on the illusion of justice. A cruel and enthralling story that obliges the reader to emotionally experience the paradox and the extreme consequences of the death penalty. With a surprising and devastating end that definitively overturns the mechanism of crime and punishment.