Marie Brand und die Ehrenfrauen (2023)

Detective Marie Brand is an immediate witness to the explosion of a construction site container, in which engineer Claudio Messina is killed. She immediately calls in her colleague Simmel because, in her view, it was murder—a conclusion later confirmed by the forensic investigation. When they establish the victim’s identity, it turns out that his wife is a personal acquaintance of Jürgen Simmel. Marie Brand immediately notices the victim’s wife’s Sicilian dialect, which does not fit her claim that she is from Milan. Simmel’s attempt to consult the official files on the victim and his wife proves similarly surprising: they are classified, suggesting that both people are part of a witness-protection program. This suspicion is confirmed, and leads them to suspect they are dealing with the Italian Mafia. Giuseppe Costa seems suspicious: not only is he responsible for staffing the construction site, but he also owns several small businesses on the side that suggest money laundering. After her husband’s death, Francesca Messina no longer wants to hide. She gets her two children to safety and takes up the fight against her adversaries. However, she cannot understand why they killed her husband rather than her, given that her family regards her as a traitor. She searches her husband’s laptop for clues and finds photographs whose significance is not immediately clear to her. Her first move is to demand answers from Giuseppe Costa, whom she believes knows who was behind the attack on her husband. She learns that her own sister has taken over the family’s Mafia business and ordered the hit. When Brand and Simmel go to see Giuseppe Costa because DNA traces link him to causing the explosion, they find him shot dead. Brand had found evidence of shell companies in the records of the company Claudio Messina worked for, which he had apparently been trying to investigate. While checking on Costa’s main business partner, Uwe Schimkat, who controls the construction site where Messina was killed, the investigators encounter Karla Giordano, the woman currently at the head of the Giordano clan. Brand and Simmel are on alert. They surveil Karla Giordano as she is collecting cash from the bank through her front men. When Brand and Simmel lose sight of her, Francesca Messina intercepts her sister in the bank’s underground garage and threatens her with a gun. Karla insists that she did not know the construction worker who had started asking uncomfortable questions and might have exposed her business was Claudio. Brand prevents Messina from shooting her sister, and Karla Giordano is arrested. They will be able to prove that she murdered Costa, and Messina and her children will be relocated to a new home through the witness-protection program.