Freshly-divorced journalist Dicte Svendsen (Iben Hjejle, MIFUNE) moves back to her home town of Aarhus from Copenhagen to take over the crime beat of local paper Dagbladet. Having run away from her Jehovah's Witness parents after they forced her to give away her newborn son at sixteen, Dicte also wants to track him down. Reconnecting with her best friends - midwife Anne (Lærke Winther, FLAME AND CITRON) and housewife Ida Marie (Lene Maria Christensen, LEGACY) and trying to help her teenager daughter Rose (Emilie Kruse) adjust to life away from everything familiar, the last thing she needs is her ex-husband Torsten (Lars Ranthe, THE HUNT) moving to town to be closer to Rose (as well as trying to rekindle their relationship). She literally stumbles upon her first case on the docks when she ducks out of view to relieve herself and discovers the body of an Eastern European hooker who has died from a botched C-section, putting her onto the track of baby traffickers despite the discouragement of investigating detective John Wagner (Lars Brygmann, UNIT ONE) and his gay colleague Linda Bendtsen (Ditte Ylva Olsen). Taking the case personally, Dicte not only threatens the paper's amicable relationship with the police but also betrays her colleagues, particularly photographer Bo Skytte (Dar Salim, A HIJACKING) in the interests of pursuing the truth at all costs. The next crime happens in her own backyard, actually her neighbor's on Midsummer's Eve when she discovers the body of a housesitting schoolteacher hanging in the house next door. Upon learning that the woman was murdered, she looks into her past and tries to track down the woman's troubled daughter. When a subsequent murder happens, the tie between them appears to be that they were both bad mothers, and Dicte maybe next on the list when a rival paper exposes her own secret shame. When Dicte discovers a dead baby floating Moses-like along the canal, she infiltrates the closed society of Muslim refugees but soon finds her attention divided when Ida Marie's newborn baby disappears from the hospital. Things get even more personal when Dicte is given tips about an illegal organ trafficking operation by jailed murderer Peter (Thue Ersted Rasmussen) whose interest in her is highly suspect, and the series closer finds Dicte trying to find her son before the police do when his fingerprints are discovered at the sight of a bombing that may have been an assassination attempt against a female politician (Marie Askehave, THE KILLING). Based on the books by Elsebeth Egholm, DICTE is on the lighter side of Nordic Noir, focusing as much on the soapier side of the protagonist's life as it does on gritty crimes which always seem to hit home for her due to her backstory as each case seems to tie in to the theme of motherhood. Subplots involve Dicte's burgeoning relationship with Bo, Wagner's tentative flirtation with Ida Marie whose husband Theis (Jakob Ulrik Lohmann, A ROYAL AFFAIR) has been cheating on her, Dicte's trying to teach Rose to learn from her own life lessons, and Torsten and Anne carrying on behind Dicte's back.