Miss Merkel - Ein Uckermark-Krimi (2023)

After retiring as Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel has moved with her husband, Joachim Sauer, and her pug, Helmut (named after her political mentor Helmut Kohl), to Freudenstadt, a small town in the Uckermark. However, she finds it difficult to adjust to the tranquil life in the countryside after the stressful routine of politics in Berlin. Activities such as hiking and baking soon bore her. On a walk in the woods, Merkel and Sauer are nearly trampled by a knight in armor galloping toward them; at the last second, their bodyguard, Mike, throws himself in front of the couple and manages to stop the horse. Baron Philip von Baugenwitz has made his mad dash on horseback to invite the prominent couple to the 500th-anniversary celebration at his castle. The centerpiece of the festivities is a play he has written and performs himself, about his great-great-grandfather’s poisoning by his mistress, who later fell to her death from the church tower. While Angela manages, with some difficulty, to persuade Joachim to dance, their host samples a wine in the vaulted cellar that he plans to serve to his distinguished guests later. But as soon as he has drained his goblet, he falls to the floor and dies. The wine-cellar door, however, is locked from the inside. The investigating detective, Hannemann, takes this as a clear sign of suicide, while Angela cannot imagine that the fun-loving knight would kill himself on his very own special day. She suspects a crime and grows increasingly bold in conducting her own investigations. Bodyguard Mike is there every step of the way, whether he likes it or not. Suspects include the knight’s former wife, who still works as the castle’s housekeeper and has a strangely relaxed relationship with von Baugenwitz’s current, alcoholic wife. Her daughter Pia, from her first marriage, acts like a teenage brat and is an influencer. The current wife also has a motive as an heir—and she has already killed her husband once in the play. The tour guide, Marie Horstmann, is also acting mysterious, partly because she is trying to conceal a pregnancy. Finally, the local police officer, Lena Amado, is conspicuously whispering with von Baugenwitz’s ex-wife and is shown to be an ambitious archer—in a later scene, an invisible assailant shoots at Merkel in the woods with arrows fitted with hunting blades. She escapes unharmed thanks to a Trabant driver who happens to come along. The autopsy, which Merkel attends with keen interest, finds that the knight died of hemlock poisoning. This matches the historical model. On the same occasion, Merkel manages to take a key that really does fit a secret passage, which Merkel had always insisted must exist because only a secret passage could explain how the cellar door had been locked from the inside. But the passage does not lead to the cellar; it goes straight to the knight’s bedroom. It was used to enable the sexually hyperactive baron to keep bringing new lovers into his room. From this information and some documents she finds in the bedroom, Merkel deduces that Marie Horstmann is carrying the knight’s illegitimate son, who would therefore be entitled to inherit. But in the end, Mike’s smartphone points her in the right direction—at her husband’s request, she is only allowed to use a basic cell phone, so she won’t hear too much about world events. It enables her to interpret the mysterious letter that the dying baron wrote in red wine on a wine crate as an “@” and follow up on a promising lead. Meanwhile, the current wife, Alexa von Baugewitz, suggests meeting in the church because she knows who the murderer is. But after a chase, Merkel and Mike find only the pastor in the church, while Alexa falls from the tower. The historical ballad seems to be repeating itself. The dénouement takes place in classic Miss Marple fashion, as a garden tea party at Merkel’s villa. All the suspects are gathered, and evidence is presented which, taken together, shows that Pia killed the baron out of hatred for men, taking revenge on behalf of her cheated-on mother. She mixed the hemlock into the wine and, after her stepfather’s death, locked the cellar door from the inside, then waited inside a wine barrel wearing scuba gear until the coast was clear. Her social-media account showed her as both a diver and an archer, meaning she alone had the profile required to be the culprit. At this point in the revelations, the ex-wife, Katharina von Baugewitz, pulls out a gun and claims that she killed her former husband, but this turns out to be only an attempt to protect her daughter. Pia, in turn, is taken by surprise by the revelation that her stepfather secretly adopted her, making her the main heir. Katharina is overpowered by Mike and Lena Amado, while the excitement brings on premature labor for Marie Horstmann, who has to be taken to the hospital. Lena Amado is also cleared of suspicion—she had been whispering with Katharina von Baugewitz so that she could be less strict about the security requirements for the 500th-anniversary celebration. Mike likes this, since he and Lena have taken an interest in each other. Detective Hannemann is happy because Angela forgoes the publicity and lets newspaper articles credit him with solving the case. In the final scene, Angela finds Joachim asleep in front of the television. The two go to bed, and once Joachim is fast asleep, Angela swaps her bedtime reading: instead of Konrad Adenauer’s memoirs, she pulls a crime novel from under the covers titled “Murder in the Cemetery”—the title of the second Miss Merkel mystery.