Thomas Hettche's touching classic novel - now available from KiWi. Only Hans Arbogast knows what really happened on that late summer evening in 1953 when the young hitchhiker Marie Gurth got into his Borgward coupe. The court follows the prosecutor's plea: life imprisonment for the "lust murderer." This is the story of a passionate encounter and a piece of German judicial and post-war history from 1953 to 1969, set between the Black Forest and Ticino, Frankfurt and East Berlin. Thomas Hettche's novel tells a love story whose dark side is death, featuring a billiard table salesman for whom prison becomes a second skin over fourteen years, along with publicists, lawyers, and a forensic pathologist from the GDR - all of whom become entangled in the Arbogast case, grappling with the enduring question of innocence or guilt.