Die verschwundene Familie (2019)

On the beach in the fictional small town of Nordholm in Schleswig-Holstein, the body of family man Jakob Thomsen is found. He has apparently fallen from the cliff. His wife, Anna, and daughter, Lilly, have vanished without a trace; only the family’s son, Tom, is still there. Police officer Hella Christensen, the Thomsens’ neighbor, takes charge of the investigation with her superior, Simon Kessler. Hella’s marriage falls apart when she discovers that her husband, Johannes, is having an affair with the missing Anna, making Johannes a suspect for a time in her disappearance. When Lilly is found on the beach, completely exhausted, the investigation takes a turn: she had been kidnapped and held captive in an old bunker on the property of the writer Holler. Holler, in turn, had been blackmailed because he had engaged in sexual relations with minors in Hamburg, and is eventually arrested for this. However, neither Lilly’s kidnapping nor the murder of her father can be proven against him. Nor can the crime be proven against Carsten Jung, a friend of the deceased. The case is solved shortly before the end, more or less by chance: Lilly’s grandmother finds a scrap of fabric from Anna’s blouse that Anna’s father had hidden in the lake. The scrap had been sent to him as part of an attempt to extort ransom from him for Anna and Lilly’s kidnapping, which he kept secret. Anna’s father himself identified his much-hated son-in-law, Jakob, as the kidnapper and blackmailer and confronted him. During their argument, he pushed Jakob down the cliff. Anna had planned and staged the kidnapping with Jakob to get money from her wealthy father, and was staying on a boat off the coast, where Christensen and Kessler find her after Christensen discovers a picture of the boat in her mailbox.