The body of a young Mexican woman is found in the Main Valley, south of Würzburg. Inspector Peter Haller and his colleague Birgit Sacher are involved in solving the crime. Haller is not yet forty and was born in Würzburg. He has a quiet love for his city, for its clarity and familiarity. He will never fully understand how people can become criminals in such a beautiful environment. This is the secret drive behind his investigations, in which he is not just concerned with solving the case, but with looking into the soul of the perpetrator.

Set in the 1800s when Napoleon’s French ruled Europe, the film follows young Austrian carpenter Franz and his Bavarian wife, Katharina as an unforeseen event forces them to flee from Augsburg, Bavaria for Franz’s family home in Tyrol, Austria. Tyrolian sentiment is rising strongly against Napoleon and trouble is stirring. In no time it sweeps up Franz and his brothers along with the whole town.

After his wife is murdered Karl loses his fire and disappears into underground Munich. He resurfaces as a hired snoop for Earth Now, a radical ecology group. Enter the beautiful and mysterious Petra Schmitt. She hires Karl to find her missing sister and Karl soon finds himself drawn into a world of half-truths and lies as his simple missing-person case develops into a murder case that quickly becomes international in scope. Petra and Karl must work together in order to thwart Petrov, a cold-blooded gangster who will kill anyone who gets in his way. While fighting to save themselves, they must prevent Petrov from getting a stolen computer chip containing the international banking codes for the new Euro.

Vera, a young woman who accompanied the elderly and very sick people to suicide. When she meets dementia Gerda on her next assignment, she realizes that Gerda has a mysterious connection to Vera's family. Vera tries to extend the life of Gerda against the will of the family to solve the mystery.