Katja Winzer is a woman with both feet firmly on the ground. She works as a physiotherapist and lives with her eight-year-old son Tobias and her boyfriend Jürgen Behrendt, who is unemployed and psychologically unstable, in a converted farmhouse near Bremerhaven. 

When Tobias doesn't return from playing with some friends one evening and phone calls to everybody who might know where he is proved fruitless, Katja informs the police.

Chief Inspector Roman Maartens is moving into the house which has just been completed for his family but has to cut short his leave, because he is the only person with the psychological training to counsel family members in a case like this. After the biggest search operation in the country the terrible possibility that the boy might have been the victim of a violent crime is confirmed as a gruesome truth. From this moment onwards there is no meaning to Katja’s life any more, and Roman is obliged to do everything he can to save her from the only way out she can envisage: suicide...