On his first day of work in Weimar, detective inspector Lessing is greeted more enthusiastically than he would have expected from this dreamy small town. He gets caught up in a large-scale police operation. A crazy blackmailer has holed up in the town hall with the pregnant commissioner Kira Dorn. Lessing's new boss, Kurt Stich, attempts to negotiate to save Kira's life. Without hesitation, Lessing intervenes. He manages to overpower the kidnapper. But he has no time to catch his breath and settle in: the Weimar sausage queen Brigitte Hoppe is missing. Their butchery is famous for the "Fette Hoppe", the best bratwurst in Thuringia. Kira Dorn and Lessing find evidence that Ms. Hoppe was the victim of a violent crime.
There are suspectsa lot, because the missing person is rich and known to be cold-hearted. Her son Sigmar is also targeted by the investigators - and with him his secret girlfriend Nadine Reuter, who is already a widow twice in her early 30s. Did the femme fatale Nadine get her lover to kill his own mother for greed? Mrs. Olm, the head of the regulatory office, also seems to play an opaque role. Or is the horse-drawn carriage Caspar Bogdanski, who was driven to ruin by Brigitte Hoppe, the culprit? A call from a stranger takes a surprising turn: Brigitte Hoppe has been kidnapped. When the money delivery fails, the commissioners have doubts. They believe more and more that Brigitte Hoppe was murdered and that the perpetrator is demanding ransom for a corpse.