Istanbul Passage

by Joseph Kanon

First published 2012

Amazon

3.9(1,975)

Istanbul, 1945. American businessman Leon Bauer has spent the war performing discreet courier jobs for the Allied intelligence network in a neutral city crowded with refugees, diplomats, smugglers and spies. With the fighting ending and the wartime apparatus beginning to dissolve, he accepts one final assignment that should be routine. It goes violently wrong and leaves Leon responsible for a man whose identity and political value are far more dangerous than he was told.

As rival services manoeuvre for advantage in the first uncertain months after the war, Leon must decide whom he can trust and what obligations survive when official alliances change. The Bosporus, foreign embassies, old refugee routes and the remnants of wartime espionage become the setting for a story in which an ordinary intermediary is forced to act without reliable instructions as the Second World War gives way to the Cold War.