Laim und die Zeichen des Todes (2017)

Chief Inspector Lukas Laim and his colleague Anton Simhandl investigate the murder of a notary from Grünwald, whose lifeless body was found hanging by a rope from the bridge on Prater Island. The dead man had supported Jewish art, although he was not Jewish himself, and the Hebrew word for “vengeance” was written in red on his stomach. Laim tries to find out what the vengeance is about when, shortly afterward, his mother is blackmailed: she is demanded to pay 80,000 euros to prevent it becoming public that Laim’s grandfather made his fortune through Aryanization. This was possible at the time because there were people who legally approved such transfers of real estate and other valuable assets. One of them was the recently murdered notary, Lenders, who had certified hundreds of sales contracts during the Nazi era, transferring the property of Jewish families to “Aryan” buyers or to the Reich. Through his signature, the notary had participated in all these expropriations. Laim therefore wonders whether the killer had an extremist motive. There may even be connections between the Laim and Lenders families, since the notary had also received a blackmail letter like the one sent to Laim’s mother. Historian and adjunct lecturer Kammeyer is currently giving lectures on Nazi-era crimes, and the investigators think it possible that one or more of his students got the idea of extorting money from people who had benefited from the Nazi era. At the monitored money drop, one of the students, Benjamin Schumacher, is caught and arrested. But since he has no money on him, there is no legal basis for keeping him in custody. Meanwhile, Luisa Wimmer goes to the police to report that she, too, has received a blackmail letter. After she did not pay on her husband’s advice, she is found with a broken neck, and Laim’s mother is also kidnapped because she has so far refused to give in to the blackmail. An old family photograph from 1938 gives Laim a possible motive. All four people in the photograph are direct ancestors of the people being blackmailed. The trail leads to Christian Odenthal, who has been on a revenge campaign since his beloved grandmother took her own life. She had never got over the fact that her husband had shot her former boyfriend in the back, while his three companions stood by and did nothing. Laim manages to free his mother, but has to shoot Odenthal before he can kill any more people he considers guilty.