In this mystery/thriller based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Nico Thomkins (Udo Schenk), a writer, and his wife Helen (Anke Sevenich) are in the habit of playing games with one another. Even while they are breaking up, they are sufficiently in tune with one another to continue this practice. When the writer's wife takes off without leaving a note behind, people begin to suspect that he may have murdered her, and he plays along with this notion to the point of planting clues which would incriminate him. Obviously, no one with a shred of common sense would do such a thing, and these tricks get him into trouble. However, his troubles don't really begin until he starts to search for her in earnest.

Linda Lano loves her job in an advertising agency and she also loves the men. But most men think of them as machos, as does charming big business Mike Badon. She expresses this bluntly and thus puts the success of their agency on the line. The widowed Mike is intrigued by the idiosyncratic Linda. When it sparks between the two, however, the attractive Susanne Badon appears. Since Linda misses the supposedly faithless Mike the pass. Linda only realizes that Susanne is Mike's younger sister when it's almost too late.

The young and attractive police inspector Lola Kraft loses her partner during a botched operation in Stuttgart and is subsequently transferred to the supposedly quiet town of Calw as a form of punishment. But right away in her first case, which she has to solve with her new partner, the easygoing and somewhat washed-up detective Karl Jäger, she is confronted with a brutal murder: psychiatrist Dr. Claudia Kretschmer is found dead.

A strange green cloud has turned almost the entire human race into stone. The only survivors are eight children, their intrepid teacher Birnenstiel and his friend, a jolly millionaire, who by chance all happen to be in an airship above the green cloud at the time. Against this background Birnenstiel tells a bizarre adventure story in which he and the children are heroes. With loving and pointed irony he confronts his protagonists with deep-frozen beauty queens, gene-manipulated tomatoes, extraterrestrial maniacs, aggressive goldfish and last but not least the rampant mechanics of an abandoned civilisation which claims its victims one by one. When the narrator goes too far, the children take the story into their own hands...