Lisa Bihl

At first glance, Paul is just a normal eighteen-year-old. What no one knows is that Paul is bipolar. He is helplessly at the mercy of the radical mood swings in his brain. When a depressive episode ends in a suicide attempt, his single father Hardy has to commit him to a therapy center for mentally ill teenagers. At the clinic, Paul meets teenagers who are also struggling with mental problems. He has to make a decision: Does he continue to run away from his illness?

The lawyer Franziska Schlüter works for the Aescuria insurance and is responsible for processing applications for disbursement of occupational disability policies. The company policy provides as a guideline to prevent the approval as far as possible. When the widow of a victim, who committed suicide after being rejected, storms the office to loudly accuse these machinations, Franziska begins to doubt the correctness of her work and to rethink. She quits and works as a freelance lawyer to help injured parties legally to get their rights. First she deals with the case of a family in the neighborhood. The father has been in a wheelchair since an accident. However, the Strelaus have not yet seen any money from the insurance company. Initially not taken seriously by colleagues, the shy woman takes on the fight against the health insurance system and has to fight against resistance and above all with her own self-doubt.

Lukas Maler is a butcher. Albeit more out of necessity than out of passion: As the “Karajan with the scalpel”, his vocation was always forensic medicine. When he accidently destroyed all evidence against the “24-hour-killer”, his career as a coroner was done for. And not far from it was his marriage with his great love Diana, whom he could not offer anything anymore as a broken man. But Lukas gets a second chance when once again a serial killer terrifies the city because the murders resemble those of the “24-hour-killer”. Diana – who has ascended to head of the forensic institute in the meantime – knows that only the best one can solve the case. But he is not available. And so, she gets the second-best one: the most over-qualified butcher in town…

Two very different brothers: Gregor (32) and Pietschi (30). Whereas one is reliable and committed, the other is spontaneous and aimless. Gregor is married and is a good doctor; Pietschi in contrast is something of a ladies’ man and a hedonist. According to tradition, the two see each other at least once a year for a weekend of sailing. But this year Pietschi drops out without leaving a message, and simply disappears. Gregor’s life goes on, but he is confused and searches everywhere for a sign of his brother’s whereabouts. The more Gregor realises how little he knows about his brother, the more he becomes fascinated by these things he doesn't know. And the longer Pietschi remains missing, the more obsessed Gregor becomes with his brother’s fading echo, even going so far as to try and slip into his brother’s life. But what happens when one of them suddenly disappears from the mirror image? Can the other continue to be the person they are. Or rather, were?

The SOKO Köln investigates the cathedral city with humor and often with hard work. Their cases take them into a variety of environments, from the Cologne clique to the terraced housing estates on the outskirts of the city.

Faced with staff shortages, the chief of a Cologne police department convinces two retired homicide detectives to come back into the force. As their immediate superior is a young woman, a generational cultural clash is inevitable.