Within a few weeks, two murdered lovers were found in the Göhrde state forest in Lower Saxony in the summer of 1989. The popular local recreation area was quickly given the name “Totenwald” in public. When another woman later disappears, in contrast to the previous murders, the police quickly have a suspect on hand: the husband of the disappeared. His brother-in-law, a high-ranking criminal investigator, does not believe in his guilt. The investigation is said to drag on for decades and only after his retirement does he come across revealing inconsistencies in the investigation in the early 1990s. Could this reveal the entire secret of the “forest of the dead”?