After a boisterous fire election ball in a small village near Jesteburg, twelve-year-old Pauline Kandis is found dead in a nearby river. The girl drowned. But the corpse shows injuries that inspector Charlotte Lindholm suggests a violent crime. Pauline lived with her father, grandfather and older sister on a run-down farm, which the family is fighting to survive. All the more since Pauline's overwhelmed mother left the farm. The village resists the idea that the child died at the hands of someone in their midst. But who knows their neighbor? Where does disinterest begin to become neglect? Charlotte fights against her own stereotypes and against the shock of the village policewoman.
She has to disrupt the grief of those involved in order to get to the perpetrator. If she wants to come to a conclusion, then she also has to suspect people: the young farmer from the neighboring farm, with whom Pauline was secretly in love; the godfather who fails to form a relationship with a woman his own age; the violent neighbor who hits his wife and cannot be a role model for his son. Only the forensic doctor from Lüneburg is Charlotte a partner, analyzing the processes and the evidence with her with the necessary distance. A tiny clue leads Charlotte to the solution and thus not only to the perpetrator, but also to another victim of the circumstances.