In occupied Kraków, a well-dressed man with a thermos of poisoned tea and a Walther pistol moved through a city too terrified to name him. For fifteen years - across Nazi occupation and Stalinist communist rule - Wladyslaw Mazurkiewicz killed for money, disposing of his victims in the Vistula River and beneath a concrete garage floor, protected by the institutional blind spots of two totalitarian regimes and the corrupt personal loyalties of a compromised security apparatus.

Known as the Gentleman Murderer, Mazurkiewicz was a Kraków-born social predator of extraordinary cunning: a court-appointed appraiser, a driving instructor, a charming habitué of illicit card games attended by militia officers and prosecutors who became his unwitting shields. He killed at least six people and is suspected in thirty or more deaths across a fifteen-year career that ended only when a single bullet lodged in the skull of a man who refused to die.

Martin Guire's landmark work reconstructs the full arc of Mazurkiewicz's career in novelistic detail, weaving forensic psychology, social history, and political analysis into a devastating portrait of a man - and the systems that made him possible. Meticulously researched and compulsively readable, this is true crime history at its most profoun