Die Bestatterin - Der Tod zahlt alle Schulden (2019)

After her mother’s unsolved death in a hit-and-run, Lisa Taubenbaum returns to her home village in the Swabian Alb, a low mountain range. She intends to keep the family funeral business going together with her brother Hannes and her father Alfons, who has been confined to a wheelchair as a result of the accident, even though business is not going well. They get some work when the local bank director accidentally shoots himself while hunting and an elderly woman apparently dies of a heart attack—both deaths, according to the doctor’s findings, are easily explained. The local police officers, who in Lisa Taubenbaum’s eyes show very little initiative, see no reason to take action, but Lisa does. She notices faint strangulation marks on Ilse Wertbacher’s body; what’s more, Ilse was found less than two kilometers from the dead bank director. Lisa immediately sees a connection and tries to get to the bottom of it. She tells Ilse’s granddaughter about her discovery, but the young woman cannot imagine who would have strangled her grandmother. The police officers, too, simply refuse to take Lisa’s discovery seriously. Then, to the funeral congregation’s great annoyance, Criminal Inspector Thomas Zellinger from Stuttgart unexpectedly interrupts the burial ceremony and seizes the body. Lisa had sent her findings to Stuttgart, so she is surprised that anyone seems interested in the true cause of death after there had been no response for three days. Zellinger praises Lisa’s attentiveness and listens with interest when she tells him there was another death in her village on the same day. He questions the people he considers possible suspects, which in Ilse Wertbacher’s case includes her granddaughter Anna, who would have had a strong motive as the main heir. Lisa is not at all happy about this: her actions have already turned half the village against her, and she does not want to fall out with her only friend as well. So Lisa sets out to find the murderer herself. She hopes to get some clues from the Polish seasonal workers employed at the Wertbacher estate. In the process, she discovers that Ilse had been having an affair with Pawel Sulowski for 30 years and was on her way back from Pawel to her estate on the day she died. Lisa suspects that Ilse may have witnessed the bank director’s murder and had to die because of it. In the end, Lisa discovers that the recent murders also affect her personally: they stem from her mother’s accident, which Bank Director Hubinger had been able to cover up ever since, since local police officer Franz Goller was also in his car and had allowed the investigation to fizzle out. But Hubinger was increasingly troubled by his guilty conscience and wanted to turn himself in, which would inevitably have ended Goller’s career. So Goller shot Hubinger and made it look like an accident. The elderly Mrs. Wertbacher had to die because she happened to pass by and witnessed the crime.