Jules Maigret, a meticulous Parisian police detective, is a famous literary character. In this film adaptation of his stories, he's trying to solve a murder of a friend, a P.I. who was looking into an industrialist and his family.

A reporter who needs cash for his son's operation is paid by a smuggler to take a murder rap.

A psychiatrist plots to murder his wife so he can be with his mistress, but his wife mysteriously disappears before he can carry out his plan.

A 'machinegunner' (West Country slang for a debt-collector) turns amateur sleuth, but finds himself in hot water with local criminals.

Vusi Madlazi returns to the South African village he left as a young boy (he was organizing against apartheid, and left in fear of his life) to bury his father. He meets up with his brother Ernest, who tells him their other brother Stephen couldn't be contacted. Vusi goes to Johannesburg to find him, but at first can only find his neighbor/girlfriend, Karin, a stripper. Vusi proceeds to learn how conditions have changed since the end of apartheid, not always for the better for black men.

The daughter of a textile company owner falls in love with a young illustrator with a secret criminal past.