Zu jung zu sterben. Ein Krimi aus Passau (2022)

Austrian private detective Ferdinand Zankl is hired by Passau restaurant owner Roman Haslinger to look for his 25-year-old ex-girlfriend, cultural studies student Lina Ampft. Haslinger is missing €50,000, ten luxury watches worth more than €90,000, and 80 grams of cocaine, so he does not want to go to the police. Zankl recruits Berlin police officer Frederike Bader, who is living in Passau under witness protection, to help with the search. One of the watches is a smartwatch with GPS. Tracking it through a mobile app leads Frederike to the scrapyard of Alois Mayr, who has been convicted of handling stolen goods, tax evasion, illegal weapons possession, and assault. During a beer hike, a group of young men find a 1979 Golf convertible in a wooded area near Passau, with Lina Ampft’s body in the back seat. The car had been given to her by her admirer Xaver, the son of scrapyard owner Alois Mayr. Zankl suspects that Xaver has taken over his father’s stolen-goods business and that Lina wanted to leave Passau; before doing so, she had wanted to sell the stolen watches to Xaver. Xaver, who had stalked Lina, as recordings on his computer show, did not want to let her go and had murdered her. Frederike, however, is convinced that Xaver is not the killer because he is deeply grieving for Lina. Bader and Zankl investigate alongside Chief Inspector Hermine Grill of the Passau criminal investigation department. Its new head is Chief Superintendent Jochen Mohn, who used to protect Bader as a witness. Meanwhile, Mia applies to the Passau Press for a two-week internship. She tells her supervisor, Robert Stein, that she wants to become a journalist like her father, who disappeared when Mia was eight. From Mohn’s assistant, Anja Heilmann, Zankl learns that the police found a second blood trail in the convertible’s back seat, belonging to Daniela Ulmen, a student whose body had been recovered from the Danube two years earlier. No perpetrator was identified at the time. At Mayr’s scrapyard, Frederike runs into Hubertus Fux, a sworn court interpreter who has worked for the police and the courts for five years. After she encounters him again at the police station, Zankl and Frederike follow him by car. Hubertus Fux was the previous owner of the Golf convertible in which Lina Ampft was found. Frederike therefore suspects that Fux murdered Ulmen back then and had the car scrapped so the forensic investigators would find no evidence pointing to him. In Hubertus Fux’s garden, Zankl and Bader see his wife Esther and daughter Sarah suddenly lose consciousness. Hubertus takes them to a shed and douses himself with petrol. Bader manages to stop him in time from shooting his wife and daughter and setting himself on fire. Frederike learns from Martha Kruppka, Alois Mayr’s fiancée, that Xaver has meanwhile been arrested by the police. He is suspected of murdering Lina Ampft. However, Martha admits that she saw Alois arguing with Lina, during which Lina was fatally injured by Alois. She had taken Lina to the woods in the convertible to protect Alois, who is mentally impaired. She took the money and watches and flushed the drugs down the toilet. After Mia, who had originally wanted to investigate Passau’s drug scene, writes a profile of her boss, confectioner Roswitha Hertel, for her internship, Roswitha is stabbed and robbed in her bakery by a drug addict. Adil Bahdari turns up at Zankl’s and asks him to find his son, Ahmed.