2025 State Prize for Fiction

Shortlisted for the Athens Prize for Literature of (De)kata literary journal

On September 15, 1981, ten-year-old Ursula Hermann was abducted while returning from a nearby village. Nineteen days later, police found her body in a forest near Lake Ammer. Years later, on May 16, 2006, Charlotte Beringer was discovered murdered in her penthouse in central Munich, above a four-story parking garage. The case became known as the ‘parking garage murder.’ After a dramatic trial, her nephew was sentenced to life in prison. Sixteen years after the verdict, author Minos Efstathiadis visits him in prison, hoping to find out if he is truly guilty or a victim of a judicial mistake. But the clues take him in a different direction, back to the forest. Meanwhile, police arrest a fellow villager of the Hermanns as the main suspect in Ursula’s murder. He claims he is innocent. The missing link seems to run through the forest and into the heart of Munich. Could there be a connection between the girl’s kidnapping and the parking garage murder, twenty-five years apart?