Splintered Justice

Sometimes, a murder stays hidden in plain sight. When it isn’t clear that a crime has been committed, how do you get justice for the victim?

This is a question that Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder of the Bern Police and her investigating partner Renzo Donatelli ask themselves as they tackle two cases that may not be what they appear.

One drama plays out in the home of an elderly couple—quiet people who have never come to the attention of the police. Now the old man is dead, his wife the only suspect. Did she kill him for his money or to end his suffering from dementia?

The second crime occurs inside Bern’s imposing fifteenth-century Münster. Renzo is on the scene by chance when a young man working on a medieval window is injured by a fall from a scaffold—a fall engineered by a teenage boy. Learning that the boy’s actions are linked to his mother’s suicide fifteen years before, Renzo decides to reexamine the woman’s death. Fresh from his divorce, he hopes that working on his own case will help him get promoted to homicide detective.

As Renzo pushes relentlessly to determine if crimes were committed in the past, he worries about how much of the dead woman’s history he can unearth without damaging the teenage boy and his older sister. And is it significant that their mother jumped from the Münster’s soaring tower while the glassworker was living in the church with his grandparents as a child?

Frustrated by her case, Giuliana can’t help getting involved in Renzo’s. Now that he has left his wife, she knows she has to choose what she wants from their future together. Pursuing their investigations into two ambiguous deaths, both detectives find the truth hard to define as justice recedes into the distance.