"On a warm September afternoon in 1953, Hans Arbogast, a traveling salesman, offers a ride to a hitchhiker - a striking young woman with curly red hair and a sonorous laugh, a refugee from East Berlin. Her name is Marie. They have a brief but passionate encounter in a meadow at dusk. And then she is dead. Arbogast is put on trial for her murder, and in a postwar Germany that has no tolerance for scandal, he is convicted, despite his protestation of innocence. The life imprisonment. All appeals are denied, and for the next fourteen years he grows to inhabit his prison cell as if it were a second skin. Then a journalist and a lawyer team up to have the case reopened. Central to their effort is the testimony of a forensic expert from East Berlin, who finds herself drawn in, with unexpected consequences." Inspired by an actual trial that caused a furor at the time, The Arbogast Case elegantly weaves dramatic courtroom scenes with detailed forensic descriptions and authentic details of the grim postwar era. The result is a compelling legal thriller in which erotic love and death are intimately intertwined, by a young German writer whose lyrical style and originality have brought him renown throughout Europe, and who is now being published in English for the first time.