Architect Peter Crookham is running late for a dinner party with his estranged journalist brother and his gorgeous German wife, Mariana. He enters his home to discover his brother viciously stabbed to death and his wife covered in blood and clutching a knife, catatonic. Refusing to accept that Mariana could be responsible for Andy's death, Peter vows to clear her name.
As he begins to search the past for clues, Peter soon learns that Andy had been looking into Mariana's murky past in Germany, and had even traveled to Berlin to piece together some facts about her childhood. Anxious for answers, Peter retraces his brother's steps in East Berlin--and finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving violent remnants of the former East German security service, the feared STASI.
With a split narrative that alternates back and forth between Peter's current hunt for the truth and the horrendous realities of life in communist East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, "Blood Relative" asks the question: How well do we really know the ones we love?