Breslau in the 1920s is haunt of marquises and merchants, gamblers and gutter-rats. Eberhard Mock, the hardened Criminal Councillor, fits right in as he sways from the basements of grubby casinos to his beautiful young wife in their palatial mansion. But his beautiful young wife is feeling neglected. A series of sinister murders linked by the dates of past crimes has taken Mock out of the bedroom and into the archives. While Mock ransacks the city for clues, driven mad by the killer's tantalizing notes, his wife is seeking attention elsewhere. Engaging in perverted games with her less-than-innocent girlfriends, Mock's wife is being seduced by a mysterious sect which preaches the imminent end of the world.

It is 1919 in Breslau. The hideously battered bodies of four young sailors are discovered on an island in the River Oder. When Criminal Assistant Mock arrives at the scene to investigate, he discovers a note addressed to him, asking him to confess his sins and to become a believer. As he endeavours to piece together the elements of this brutal crime, Mock combs the brothels and drinking dens of Breslau and is drawn into an insidious game: it seems that anyone he questions during the course of the investigation is destined to become the murderer's next victim. Ultimately he uncovers a secret society which has the Inspector himself clearly in its sights. Dark, sophisticated and uncompromising, the distinctive Breslau series has already received broad critical acclaim. Phantoms of Breslau confirms Criminal Assistant Mock as surely the most outrageous and original detective in crime fiction.

Breslau was a German city on the border of Czechoslovakia. It is now, since World War II, Wroclaw, in Poland. Marek Krajewski has written a quartet of novels which unfold the history of this exceptional city, standing on the faultline and crossroads of 20th-century Europe. Breslau 1933: the mutilated bodies of a young woman and her ladies' maid are found dead on a train. Scorpions writhe in their slashed stomach - a horrifying image that becomes crucial to the investigation. Inspector Eberhard Mock is called in to deal with the case, and is assigned an assistant, Herbert Anwaldt, an orphan. The investigation leads them deep into the city's dirty underbelly, where perverted aristocrats cavort with prostitutes, corrupt ministers torture confessions from lowly Jews and Freemasons guard their secrets with blackmail and daggers. As Mock and Anwaldt unravel a mystery of ritual killing that dates back to the time of the Crusades, the elderly Mock and the young, fatherless Anwaldt become close. But the dark, occult aspect of this most macabre of cases might prove too much for Anwaldt's sanity before a solution is secured. What makes Krajewski's story so uncommonly powerful is the stifling atmosphere he conjures of a city in the grip of the Gestapo.

Build efficient and fast Qt applications, target performance problems, and discover solutions to refine your code Key Features Build efficient and concurrent applications in Qt to create cross-platform applications Identify performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to improve application performance Delve into parallel programming and memory management to optimize your code Book DescriptionAchieving efficient code through performance tuning is one of the key challenges faced by many programmers. This book looks at Qt programming from a performance perspective. You'll explore the performance problems encountered when using the Qt framework and means and ways to resolve them and optimize performance. The book highlights performance improvements and new features released in Qt 5.9, Qt 5.11, and 5.12 (LTE). You'll master general computer performance best practices and tools, which can help you identify the reasons behind low performance, and the most common performance pitfalls experienced when using the Qt framework. In the following chapters, you'll explore multithreading and asynchronous programming with C++ and Qt and learn the importance and efficient use of data structures. You'll also get the opportunity to work through techniques such as memory management and design guidelines, which are essential to improve application performance. Comprehensive sections that cover all these concepts will prepare you for gaining hands-on experience of some of Qt's most exciting application fields - the mobile and embedded development domains. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to build Qt applications that are more efficient, concurrent, and performance-oriented in nature What you will learn Understand classic performance best practices Get to grips with modern hardware architecture and its performance impact Implement tools and procedures used in performance optimization Grasp Qt-specific work techniques for graphical user interface (GUI) and platform programming Make Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) performant and use the relevant Qt classes Discover the improvements Qt 5.9 (and the upcoming versions) holds in store Explore Qt's graphic engine architecture, strengths, and weaknesses Who this book is forThis book is designed for Qt developers who wish to build highly performance applications for desktop and embedded devices. Programming Experience with C++ is required.

When Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock is called from his New Year's Eve revelries to attend a particularly grisly crime scene, even his notoriously robust stomach is turned. A young girl - and suspected spy - who arrived by train from France just days before, has been found dead in her hotel room, the flesh torn from her cheek by her assailant's teeth. Ill at ease with the increasingly open integration of S.S., Gestapo and police, Mock is partially relieved to be assigned to liaise with officers in Lvov, Poland, where a series of similar crimes - as yet unsolved - cast a long shadow over the town.