In the sweltering Arizona desert, Maigret can't help but investigate the death of a teenage girl--even if it means questioning the stories of five men in uniform.

Maigret is touring the United States, studying their methods, when he drops by a Tucson courtroom to watch a coroner's inquest. To his surprise, he is transfixed by the case. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Mitchell, out on a drunken night with five airmen, was run over by a train. None of the men's stories match--but who is lying, and why?

As the judge questions the witnesses, Maigret longs to leap up and ask the right questions. The story of this girl's death, he realizes, precisely illuminates why American values seem so out of kilter. A tense courtroom whodunnit, Maigret at the Coroner's is also a merciless x-ray of the postwar United States, with all its submerged angst and hypocrisies.