The Summer of Cinder Red — Maynard Allington

TURKEY, 1941. Secretly backed by Berlin, a cadre of Turkish officers has planned a military coup to topple the neutralist government and enter the war on the side of the Axis.
Documents linking the insurgents to German Intelligence fall into the hands of an elusive Turkish criminal who plans to sell them back to the highest bidder. In both British and German intelligence circles, a frantic effort is mounted to recover the "Cinder Red" papers.
The hunt pits two men against each other, Wolf Koeller, a former pentathlon athlete from the 1936 Olympic Games and now military intelligence officer, and Wilson Chance, an American on the run from the Turkish police. Street smart and wry, Chance has a seriocomic view of the world and cynical allegiance to nothing. When the British blackmail him into working for them, he finds himself swept into the heart of the Cinder Red conspiracy, and a relationship with two women, one of whom is a double agent. From the cabarets and teeming brothel quarter of Adana, to the ruins of a crusader castle above the Mediterranean, Chance will follow a trail of murder and intrigue, ending in a tense rooftop chase in the old quarter of Ankara and death on a parachute tower.
The Summer of Cinder Red is a fast-paced espionage thriller that should appeal to fans of Jack Higgins and the spy genre.