Human Game revolves around Squadron Leader Frank McKenna, a Blackpool detective sergeant before joining the RAF, painstakingly piecing together the whereabouts of Gestapo agents in war-devastated Germany, most of whom don't want to be found.
The book's release is timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Great Escape.
Read, a former journalist, provides crisp and concise writing, with the overall story line regularly surging forward, especially when recounting the systematic, mirror-image murders.
For McKenna, there is no Google, computer software cross-referencing or Wikipedia in 1945; just mountains of reports, rumours, sightings and lists of hundreds of thousands of German prisoners to trawl through.
McKenna repeatedly criss-crosses ravaged Germany to piece together claims, lies and counterclaims, along the way identifying more than 300 suspects, and sending criminals to face the gallows or imprisonment.
Of the 50 airmen executed, two were New Zealanders, Porokoru Patapu Pohe and Arnold Christensen; the latter's story unfolds alongside that of Australian Squadron Leader James Catanach.
Their murders differ little from the other 48. The Gestapo were sickeningly methodical in the extreme. At the chapter's end, the accused's candid confession is chilling as he justifies his murderous treatment of ''sub-humans''.
While the extent of the Nazi atrocities are manifest, Read does not shirk from criticism in Human Game of Britain's carpet bombing of German cities, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, nor British interrogation techniques, which he addresses formally from trial transcripts.
Human Game raises several questions, as in just how inhumane should interrogation become, when eliciting confessions from those who might have committed atrocities.
Read strikes a good balance in not reporting the finer detail of military process, and in sketching the airmen's personal lives in dignified and plain language.
Simon Hartley is ODT senior business reporter.
