During a dive in the Tyrolean Achensee, two scuba divers find a male corpse that was weighed down with chains and an umbrella stand. Apparently the dead man had been lying on the bottom of the lake for around 15 years. The autopsy shows the man was shot with a shotgun. Surprisingly, it turns out that the murdered man came from the former GDR. Special investigator Moritz Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) is brought from Vienna to solve the case together with Innsbruck detective Pfurtscheller (Alexander Mitterer). Moritz Eisner quickly realizes that the finding of the body and the intensive investigations by the police cause some people to become hectic.
Especially with three friends who experienced an astonishing financial boom in the years after the mysterious disappearance of the stranger: the mayor and hotelier Paul Kofler (Branko Samarovski), the director of the local bank Ludwig Holzer (Gottfried Breitfuss) and the car dealer Max Unterberger ( Wolfram Berger). Then he finds out that the GDR scientist Heinz Borovski, who had been reported missing by his daughter Sonja, was staying at the Gasthof Kofler under a false name at the time. The key figure to the solution seems to be the mayor's daughter Sonja (Laura Tonke). Her biological father had fled to Tyrol shortly before the political changes in the GDR to buy a house here.
But where did he get the capital from? Was it embezzled Stasi money and was that why he had to die? The then 17-year-old girl had come to this place to look for her father, who had sent a postcard from Lake Achensee as the last sign of life. She didn't want to go back, found work in the Kofler family's inn and was adopted by the owners some time later. The young woman, who until then had not known that her adoptive father had known her real father, is determined to bring the murderer(s) to justice and supports Moritz Eisner in his investigations. But is she a painful mourner or more of an avenging angel? When the DNA analysis shows that there is no genetic relationship with the dead man, Eisner is puzzled. A second body is discovered in the lake...