Primary school teacher Sabine Schuster suffers a sudden stroke during a theatre rehearsal with her pupils. Doctors are able to save her life in hospital, but the path back to everyday life is difficult and uncertain. For Sabine's husband Stefan, a forester, nothing is as it was either. While Sabine has to laboriously relearn things that are taken for granted, such as speaking or walking, in rehab, Stefan adapts the house in Ilmenau, Thuringia, to his wife's needs in the hope that the familiar surroundings will do her good. But Sabine is so disappointed by her condition that she initially resists everything that will help her recover. Out of shame, she avoids contact with her usual surroundings. She misses her work as a teacher and hiking. Seemingly lost in the mill of the care system, the new nurse Iryna, organized by Stefan, brings new hope with her very own, optimistic and demanding manner.
In the face of the bucket wheel excavators in the brown coal mining area eating their way through the muddy Rhineland soil, the Lange family is at a crossroads: what do we do when the old has to go and the new is so uncertain? The young entrepreneur Marcel Lange, hungry for success, wants to build a new high-end village and achieve social advancement. To this end, he has already had the prototype Villa Verena built on the edge of the open-cast mine, where the largest renaturalized lake in the world is to be created in just a few years. But his sister Franca is against it. In the old village, which is about to be demolished, she is holding the fort and tinkering in the basement on an electricity storage unit that will supply all the houses with green energy in the future and make them self-sufficient. In the midst of this chaos, widow and mother Angelika Lange has other plans. She wants to finally take a vacation with the relocation bonus and doesn't always want to worry about others.
Isabel Burger would normally consider herself lucky. An unexpected inheritance takes Isabel, a trained chef, to Crete, where her German father left her a country house complete with its own olive grove. If only her failed startup in Munich and the resulting financial woes hadn’t led to the recent opening of insolvency proceedings against her. Isabel’s insolvency administrator gives her four weeks to sell her house on Crete as best she can and use the proceeds to pay off her creditors.
Sauerland, autumn 1995: In the middle of the forest on the Wilzenberg, a walker finds the body of high school graduate Sonja Risse. However, the fact that the killer left a music box with the lullaby "Hush Little Baby" at the crime scene does not lead to a clear solving. 25 years later, the investigative journalist Stefanie Schneider, known as "Mütze", made a surprising discovery in Cologne. In a disused multi-storey car park, she films an undressed corpse of a man with a music box running next to it! When her colleague Jan Römer, who reported on the spectacular Sonja case as a young journalist in 1995, recognizes the melody from back then, he immediately believes there is a connection. He goes to Wilzenberg with his ambitious colleague to interview Sonja's mother Maria, her former teacher Waldheim and her best friends. The more the journalists compile, the clearer the contradictions and gaps that the investigators should have noticed at the time.
The wife of the Düsseldorf Police Council Rainer Bachmann is kidnapped. While trying to save his mother Monika, the adult son is shot dead. His widow Nicola desperately seeks support.
The wife of the Düsseldorf Police Council Rainer Bachmann is kidnapped. While trying to save his mother Monika, the adult son is shot dead. His widow Nicola desperately seeks support.