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Major Kottan (Peter Vogel) of Homicide celebrates his birthday with a barbecue in a village in Lower Austria, where he as well as many other Viennese cops has his weekend home. The next morning, a girl, Erna (Eva Linder), is found dead not far from where Kottan and friends celebrated, and since it takes for the Lower Austrian investigators a while to get there, Kottan and his assistants Schrammel (Curt A. Tichy) and Schremser (Walter Davy) are asked to help out, even if the village is outside their jurisdiction. The dead girl can quickly be traced back to the local pub, where she apparently had a big argument with her boyfriend Bösmüller (Rudolf Knor), who followed her when she stormed off - which is of course enough to treat him as the chief suspect, and Kottan especially dislikes him as Bösmüller had an affair with his daughter Sissy (Birgit Machalissa). Then though another girl, Silvia (Liliana Nelska), is found dead while Bösmüller's still in custody, so he is to let go. Silvia is traced back to the same pub, where she had taken a room with her lover Beschina (Hanno Pöschl), and after he proves innocent, the pub's landlady (Erni Mangold) and her son Erich (Michael Schottenberg) become the prime suspects, but without any proof. So Kottan's wife (Bibiane Zeller) and Kottan's Lower Austrian colleague Pilz (Karl Dobravsky) rent a room at the pub for you-know-what, and when Erich's found spying on them, that's just the piece of evidence that was missing to paint the whole picture ...

In this second episode of the series, the Kottan character is no longer as rough around the edges but still suitably grouchy and fallible (even if it's him who solves the case this time around), other than that, it continues the first episode's mix of realism, social commentary and satire as a sort of counter-programming to then current TV cop shows - something that would be given up for a much more parodistic tone in later episodes. However, the mix really works here, making this one a very decent, welcomely unpretentious murder mystery.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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