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 sentence: 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.