The non-stationary heat conduction in an infinitely wide plane slab with a prescribed boundary heat flux is studied. An arbitrary time dependent boundary heat flux is considered and a non-vanishing thermal relaxation time is assumed. The temperature and the heat flux density distributions are determined analytically by employing Cattaneo-Vernotte's constitutive equation for the heat flux density. It is proved that the temperature and the heat flux density distributions can be incompatible with the hypothesis of local thermodynamic equilibrium. A comparison with the solution which would be obtained by means of Fourier's law is performed by considering the limit of a vanishing thermal relaxation time.