For Marko, life mainly consists of frozen pizzas and back pain. For almost 30 years, the widower has been hauling frozen goods for the company "Eisland" to the front doors of his mostly older customers. When Marko has to take early retirement due to illness, his life gets into imbalance. Thereby Marko has only one goal: his studying son should have it better one day. Lawyer or judge, that would be something. The main thing is no work where you have to wear a name tag. The decease of an old female customer unexpectedly opens up a whole new business model for Marko. Unfortunately, he reckoned without the nosy neighbors. To make matters worse, his own son also finds out about it. Marko's house of cards threatens to collapse. Then he meets his idol Roland Kaiser at the bar.
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.
Peter and Lisbeth are two young but unfortunate lovers living in a rigid rural community in the Black Forest. She comes from a wealthy family of glassblowers; he is a poor coal worker on the lower end of society. To become rich and respected, Peter makes a pact with a devil named Dutch Michael, who rips out his heart and replaces it with a stone. Robbed of all warmth and feeling, Peter becomes a cold-hearted go-getter who rapidly achieves his goals. Ruthlessly he strives for money and power.
The IEK team investigates the corpse of 1970s-disappeared flower girl Monika Rothmann, both burned and suffocated as drowned. She was believed to have abandoned husband Herbert and daughter Anja without a trace, but it turns out she started a new life as a political and environmental activist, yielding potential motives and suspects, but also an adulterous affair.
Handsome Albanian villager Arben wants to marry Etleva, daughter of a neighboring clan, but her father has promised her to another man who is offering a 10,000€ bride price. But when it turns out Etleva is carrying Arben's child, the pressure is on for him to come up with the dowry before the baby is born -- and before her brothers take revenge for the dishonor he has brought their family. Fleeing to Berlin without papers, experience or knowledge of the language, Arben soon learns the ways of survival.
