Valentin Hess

The unsuccessful and financially troubled writer Umberto Designori discovers a historical document in the Ticino village of Montagnola. Suspecting that it was authored by the famous writer Hermann Hesse, who spent the final years of his life in Montagnola, he sets off for Calw. However, the town archivist and Hesse expert, Dr. Giebenrath, reveals to him that the document is a forgery. The following night, Designori falls to his death. The supposed Hesse letter has disappeared. Detectives Lola Kraft and Jasmin Stein of the "Mordkommission Calw" begin their investigation.

The young and attractive police inspector Lola Kraft loses her partner during a botched operation in Stuttgart and is subsequently transferred to the supposedly quiet town of Calw as a form of punishment. But right away in her first case, which she has to solve with her new partner, the easygoing and somewhat washed-up detective Karl Jäger, she is confronted with a brutal murder: psychiatrist Dr. Claudia Kretschmer is found dead.

This time, Tatort Calw takes us to the stage, the world's greatest stage. During an amateur theater performance, a version of Romeo & Juliet "translated" into Swabian, a shot is fired according to the script. But the bullet was not a blank. The result: undertaker and amateur actor Günther Jourdan lies dead on the stage. A new case for Calw detectives Jäger, Kraft, and Hoffmann, who now find themselves confronted with a multitude of quarrels, motives, and suspects within the theater troupe. Secret affairs, property disputes, pregnancies, and personal animosities. The theater people are like a prime-time soap opera on private television. However, when the alleged perpetrator is identified, there is a surprising twist.

Through an inheritance, a group of friends find out that their grandfathers had found crates of gold in the wreckage of a crashed plane in the final days of the Second World War. A short time later, the men were killed and the gold was never found. Now the gawky grandsons are trying to recover the treasure. In the process, they come up against crooks, speculators and old and neo-Nazis.

Because detectives Jäger and Kraft botched an unauthorized operation, they now have to face the consequences: they are demoted and placed under the command of their colleague Hoffmann. In their private lives, too, things are not as they should be. While Jäger is kept busy at night by his young children, Lola and Andreas' relationship is in crisis. The Calw investigators are really not having an easy time of it at the moment. And then there's their new case, which seems to be a tough one. When businessman Till Ritter is found dead, everything seems clear at first: suicide. But the matter becomes more complicated. Why was Ritter's daughter kidnapped? And what is his son Philip hiding? And what does the body found in a nearby lake have to do with it? The three detectives and their new colleague still have a lot of work ahead of them, because there is still a long way to go before all the questions are answered and the case can be closed...