Tiara

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Burke, a screenwriter as well as a novelist, divides his time between
Toronto and Santa Monica. His Connections, a film about the Canadian
Mafia, was well received in media circles. He was also a Vietnam
correspondent. Movie and war experience are both abundantly evident in
Tiara, a book written very much with Hollywood in mind. There are
broadly cinematic sequences in this action story about two itinerant
pilots tricked into going to Iraq, just before the Gulf War breaks out,
to liberate an object code-named Tiara. The fact that Tiara turns out to
be a beautiful and sexy young woman (who is also the lost daughter of
one of the pilots) should not really surprise any reader who has been
picking up the foreshadowing Burke drops along the way.

Frank and Zoot, the pilots, arrive in Baghdad undercover in a wagon
filled with camel dung; they leave, Tiara in tow, pretty much the same
way, only to be set upon by hordes of comic-book Iraqi soldiers and then
rescued by three trash-talking female GIs. Burke’s eye on Hollywood is
dead-on. A potboiler for the public library.