Thomas Hettche Der Fall Arbogast (The Arbogast File) DuMont Buchverlag, August 2001. 351pp ISBN 3-7701-5621-8 It is 1 September 1953 when Hans Arbogast stops by the roadside to offer a lift to the young red-headed refugee from East Germany, Marie Gurth. She accepts, they stop again beside a brook in the wilds of the countryside and there, by mutual consent, make violent, uninhibited love. Then suddenly the girl is dead. Arbogast, a local married man, who is known to have an eye for a pretty girl, and who helps run the family pub when he is not out as a rep selling billiard tables, is tried for her murder. He admits intercourse, but pleads not guilty to causing her death. The evidence appears inconclusive, there are hints that Arbogast is not as innocent as he seems. Manslaughter perhaps? The case is swung by the single expert witness for the prosecution, relying on photographic evidence, who portrays him as a sadist who battered the young woman, then raped and strangled her. Arbogast is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. For many years he protests his innocence but no one listens, until a visiting prison teacher mentions that there has been a reform of the German judicial system and his case could be reopened. A retrial is ordered, new forensic specialists consider the evidence, death by heart failure is accepted and Arbogast's name is cleared. Such is the framework of this grim, riveting book in which the senses - of colour, taste and smell - play a vital part. The narrative treats the reader as the social system treats Hans, reflecting the attitudes of that grey, postwar era in which rigid views reigned and the imagination seemed on hold. Much of the imagery is in black and white - in a case where obviously nothing is black and white. This is, however, more than a thriller or courtroom drama. It is in many ways a paradigm of the postwar Germanies, east and west. One very much hopes that British and American readers will be given the chance to taste this remarkable novel for themselves.