Music for Love or War

According to what we've been told, the source of all knowledge is somewhere just south of Sunset Boulevard. The problem is that Danny has lost the address.

So begins Martyn Burke's tragi-comic novel of love and war. Danny, a Canadian sharpshooter, and Hank, in the U.S. Army, have been stationed in Kandahar, but they are in Los Angeles, desperate to find the Hollywood psychic who will reveal the whereabouts of the women they love. Danny is searching for Ariana, the girl he fell in love with in Toronto in the last years of the twentieth century; Hank is searching for Annie Boudreau, known in the tabloids as "Annie of the Boo Two"--twins who were briefly in the gravitational pull of Hugh Hefner.

From Grenadier Pond in west-end Toronto, to Afghanistan, to the Malibu colony in LA, the novel follows these moments in the lives of Danny and Hank, revealed by a masterful storyteller and commentator on American culture. When in the mountains of Kandahar, Danny and Hank torture the members of al Qaeda and the Taliban with the music and a larger-than-life-size cardboard reproduction of Liberace in satin short shorts, high-kicking as if on Broadway.

Martyn Burke knows war-riddled Afghanistan, where he has filmed documentaries. He knows Los Angeles, where he lives and works. And he knows about terrorist families based in multicultural Toronto, his second home. In 2012, his feature documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat won a Peabody and he was short-listed for an Academy Award. In 2015, Martyn received the Auteur Award from the International Press Academy. Previous recipients include Guillermo del Toro, Baz Luhrmann, and George Clooney.