Bodenstein & Kirchhoff

On a rainy November day, police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer. On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace.

On a hot June day the body of a 16-year-old girl washes up on a river bank outside of Frankfurt. She has been brutally murdered, but no one comes forward with any information as to her identity. Even weeks later, the local police have not been able to identify her. Then a new case comes in: a popular television reporter is attacked, raped, and locked in the trunk of her own car. She survives - barely - and is able to supply certain hints to the police having to do with her recent investigations into a child welfare organization and the potential uncovering of a child pornography ring with members from the highest echelon of society.

The body of 92-two-year-old Jossi Goldberg, Holocaust survivor and American citizen, is found shot to death execution style in his house near Frankfurt. A five-digit number is scrawled in blood at the murder scene. The autopsy reveals an old and unsuccessfully covered tattoo on the corpse's arm - a blood type marker once used by Hitler's SS. Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are faced with a riddle. Was the old man not Jewish after all? Who was he, really?

Detective Pia Kirchhoff is about to set off on a long-delayed honeymoon when she receives a phone call. An elderly woman has been shot and killed while walking her dog. A short while later, another murder is committed, and the modus operandi is eerily similar: A woman is killed by a bullet that smashes through her kitchen window - and in both cases the same weapon fired the shot. Two more murders follow in short order. None of the victims had enemies, and no one knows why they were singled out.