Former detective Lukas Geier has retired to Bad Gastein in the Austrian Alps. While he is busy to reinvent himself, his former life as an investigator catches up with him.
As a forestry student doing an internship, Anja Grimm ends up in that remote area in the Upper Palatinate Forest, where she went on vacation with her parents as an eight-year-old girl and her father disappeared without a trace. Her job is to take soil samples to create a soil map. At one point in the forest floor she comes across abnormal irregularities. Not long after their arrival, a brutal murder occurs. Anja soon arouses suspicion and hostility not only among the villagers with her suspicion that the perpetrator knows something about her father's fate and with her questions about the atypical soil composition in the forest clearing. Even the police react extremely reservedly to their investigations. And when it turns out that the young woman can read the signs of the forest like an open book, forces mobilize in the village who are apparently ready for anything because there is a dark secret that needs to be kept.
In view of her success, Stella mutated into a cynical, critic-resistant alpha woman who has banished her family to a sideline. Shortly after her 60th birthday, she has an accident and can suddenly hear what those around think of her.