Der Geier - Die Tote mit dem falschen Leben (2024)

Lukas Geier is a former criminal inspector from Munich who voluntarily left the police force and is now a successful musician, having accidentally scored a major hit that climbed the international charts. To put his old life behind him—the life in which he was responsible for creating new identities for people in the witness protection program—he chooses Bad Gastein as his new home, a place he already knows well from his childhood and youth. He also shares a close friendship, going back to those days, with Lara Schnee, the attractive owner of a lovely hotel in the area. He regularly repeats his marriage proposal, but Lara turns him down each time. Geier lives in an old, secluded house high above the Gastein Valley, which he has adapted to suit his needs. After several years of living as a successful musician, his old life catches up with him. The body of Elisabeth Bergner is found in a hotel in Bad Gastein that is about to reopen. She is lying in a hotel bed, made up and with her hair styled. Since Lukas Geier’s mobile number is written on her arm, the former police officer is the prime suspect. Franziska Conte, the investigating criminal inspector with the Salzburg homicide squad, tries to solve the case alongside her colleague, patrol officer Toni Fitzmann. She quickly gets the impression that Lukas Geier knows more than he is letting on. He begins investigating on his own because he believes the murder is connected to the victim’s past. Elisabeth Bergner was an undercover investigator in the Mafia and had to enter witness protection after being exposed. Sixteen years earlier, Geier had given her a new identity, and he feels responsible for her and her new life. He therefore gets back in touch with his former boss, Frank Becker, in Munich, and with Annemarie Papst, the former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Later, Frank Becker is shot dead after uncovering the double identity of Angelo Marienthal, the boss of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta in Germany, whom Elisabeth Bergner had been assigned to investigate. Shabbir, who also lives in Geier’s circle as a close confidant under a new identity created by Geier, helps him search for the murderer, including illegally—for instance, by hacking Franziska Conte’s laptop. In the end, however, it turns out to be a crime of passion, and that Elisabeth Bergner had told her husband, Alfred Bolisto, about her old life. He could not bear that his wife’s one great love was the man he believed to be the Mafia boss Marienthal. She had also had many affairs, and, in the end, a female lover whom she wanted to help pay for an apartment. He also kills this young Ukrainian woman after learning that his wife wanted to leave him. The couple’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Raffaella Bergner, is lovingly taken in by Lara Schnee and begins an apprenticeship at her hotel. During the investigation, after initial friction between Geier and Franziska Conte, the two briefly begin to show a tender interest in one another. The ending is left open: he makes his interest in her clear, but she rejects him.