Two anglers discover a pile of corpses in a field near the polish border. The unimaginably high number of skeletons and animal carcasses leads the police to suspect a serial killer who has apparently been killing undetected for decades. Local detective inspector Roland Voit is assigned to support the large LKA contingent in the Oderbruch. His former childhood sweetheart, former policewoman Maggie Kring, is also called to her home town of Krewlow. After years of silence, Maggie and Roland are anything but impartial. Maggie is following her own investigations. She left Krewlow in 1997 after her brother became a victim of the historic Oder flood at the age of 17. The ex-policewoman doubts everything she knows - including the death of her brother Kai.

The large LKA contingent is searching for a serial killer in Krewlow and hopes to get a clue from the only survivor found on the pile of corpses. However, the seriously injured man is unresponsive. For the village doctor Frank Seeger, it is clear that "Pulver-Paul" is behind the bloody deeds. The gun-crazy hermit is holed up on his farm and obsessively believes he has to defend himself against overpowering enemies. When Roland Voit and Stanislaw Zajak want to interrogate him, a life-threatening confrontation ensues. Meanwhile, Maggie is staying with Adrian Demko, her childhood friend who is in a wheelchair. She is convinced that the key to the Oderbruch serial murders lies in their shared past.

Maggie Kring and Kai travel to the Carpathian Mountains. There, the siblings try to find out who the mysterious man is who came to the Oderbruch with their father in 1947 as a former war deserter. In Romania, however, they initially come up against a wall of silence. Roland Voit follows Maggie's tracks, even though he has been suspended from the case. He discovers the body of a dead teenager in the forest hut. When his Polish colleague Stanislaw Zajak tracks him down, Voit has no choice but to play his cards close to his chest. Zajak entrusts him with a theory about similar unsolved and mysterious murders in other countries and forces Voit to help find Kai.