Safe Haven is a single volume which contains just over three hundred pages, which is an extensive contribution to the field and in particular war crimes and the ways in which the United Kingdom was a part of this specific history. The authors are both expert and aptly placed to deliver this volume, as Jon Silverman was a BBC news journalist for twenty-six years, who reported on the UK's Nazi War Crimes Inquiries. Robert Sherwood was a Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police Service, who has written on the UK War Crimes Team comparing this with the work of the team in the US. The source material for Safe Haven is expansive, and that makes this book especially fascinating. The scope of primary sources in archival terms gives this volume great value, so too does the correspondence with academics, Nazi hunters, and those involved in the campaign in the 1980s to bring them to justice.

Safe Haven sets out an important but until of late, almost forgotten part of history, whereby alleged Second World War-era Nazi war criminals made the UK their home. This volume starts by detailing that in the 1980s in the UK, there was a sense of awakening, that the crimes of the Second World War were not over. This led on to the realization that if the crimes were not dealt with in law, then neither were the criminals. Silverman and Sherwood early on give praise to David Cesarani's volume, Justice Delayed (1992), which unpacks the history of how alleged Nazi war criminals were able to make Britain their home. That volume stops there, at the enactment of the War Crimes Act of 1991, which allowed for prosecutions of Nazi crimes. Silverman and Sherwood then examine the story thereafter, the ways in which the Metropolitan Police carried out its investigations. What Safe Haven also does is compare the ways in which other countries, such as the Commonwealth Countries of Australia and Canada, undertook their own investigations into Nazi war criminals living in their respective countries. The preface clearly sets out the key questions the book seeks to answer, and these are centered around why, when there was a War Crimes Act, was there only one successful prosecution, when several hundred potential suspects were scrutinized? The book concerns itself with pathways to trial and the difficulties and complexities of trying history in the law courts. Safe Haven gives a behind the scenes, rare glimpse into the detailed investigation that the reader would not normally be a part.

Safe Haven contains three main cases, Anton Gecas, Szymon Serafinowicz, and Antony (Andrzej) Sawoniuk. Gecas escaped trial, with Serafinowicz's formal prosecution halted in 1997, due to his ill health (177). The final case is that of Sawoniuk, who was tried and was successfully convicted in 1999. This book goes beyond the courtroom, developing new ground in contextual analysis, detailing the inconsistencies of UK procedures, but not in a way to criticize those involved in the process. It is in fact, to set out the complexities of the cases and the vast nature of the task in hand. It also sets out the factors required for successful prosecution and sheds light on this subject and the ways in which historical evidence and narrative stood up to legal scrutiny. Safe Haven seeks to fill the gap between the known and unknown in that, now that the criminal cases resulting from this period have been covered in detail, it is left for the reader to judge whether there should have been a different outcome.

In terms of interest in Nazi war criminals, there have been recent productions that have piqued the public's consciousness. For example, The Devil Next Door (Netflix 2019), a program detailing the trials of suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk, known as “Ivan the Terrible,” for crimes committed at Treblinka death camp, and whose prosecution was subsequently overturned as a case of mistaken identity. The BBC produced their own efforts with The Nazi Next Door (2021), a Radio 4 program which detailed the life of Stanislaw (Stan) Chrzanowski, whose stepson spent years investigating whether his step-parent was a Nazi war criminal. This shows there is appetite from the public in this area, and this is growing. The only discussion Safe Haven does not delve into is specific pressure group campaigning that was developed by antifascist organizations such as Searchlight, in partnership with the Union of Jewish Students, which is part of the growing area of the way in which Britain dealt with Nazi war criminals. Nevertheless, Safe Haven covers a wide scope and is comprehensive in what it covers.

In sum, this is an important, timely, and very well researched volume, which presents a largely forgotten history in new ways. It answers the questions that were left by the ending of Cesarani's Justice Delayed (1992) and picks up the rest of the story. It is an accessible read, even though it works through complex legal and political issues, without judgement, to give the reader a sense of the difficulties that were encountered by the legal process.