It's 1978, Austria. There are legends associated with the lake. The school used to be a TB clinic. Before that, a Nazi HQ. Before that, a hunting lodge. Magdalena sees something strange. Agnes is a nurse.
Later, Mathias, 10, studies a dead crow. He wants to be a vet. He has a little brother, Markus. He's in a little gang with Lucia, Diego, and Oliver.
A dead, naked man is found in the woods. His clothes have been made into a sort of scarecrow. The body's been protected from scavengers. The eyes have been removed. A ritual killing? The dead man is Diego's father.
Detective Massimo Marini has transferred here from a city. It's his first day. His boss is Teresa Battagia, who doesn't seem very impressed with him. Parasi is a colleague. Knauss is the local head of police. Antonio Parri is the clever pathologist. Abrams Viesel, the school caretaker threatens Oliver, telling him not to tell people what happened.
A mother is attacked. The attacker stops when he sees the mother's son cry. To gain his confidence, Teresa tells the boy that her husband nearly killed her.
Teresa has frailties she's trying to hide from Massimo. She's a diabetic, and is suffering memory loss. More generally, the conflicts are that she's female, the locals stick together, news of a crime will discourage tourism (the village's lifeblood), she's clever and believes in profiling, etc. She thinks there's a secret that the locals aren't telling her. Ironically, she might have to depend on an old, slightly demented woman to tell her.
Viesel is found wounded in a car, nearly dead.
At a pagan festival in the village, people wear masks. Teresa sees Lucas steal a purse and a camera. A child, Markus, goes missing.
At 2am Teresa calls the gang of kids in for questioning. They all have bad parents, and the attacked people are connected to them. She learns they have a "friend" in the woods who can't speak.
We learn about a medical report concerning two children who were raised without affection. Agnes assisted in these experiments. Magdalen was a whistleblower. Andreas Hoffman suffered least from the deprivation - a natural leader.
They find him. He's kept a bundle of bones - the other child - and the still living baby. Teresa thinks he was scared of the encroaching building work for the new ski slope. He'd attacked people who had been nasty to the gang. At the end, after an injection. she realises that the doctor who's treating her is the doctor who preformed the experiments. She ok. She visits Andreas, giving him presents from the wood, and a reminder of the other child.
It's translated as Flowers over the inferno
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