When the Killing’s Done: A Novel
About this audiobook
From the bestselling author of The Women comes an action-packed adventure about endangered animals and those who would protect them.
Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T. C. Boyle’s powerful novel combines pulse-pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the islands’ endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.
Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, contemplate acts of sabotage, court danger, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma’s grandmother, Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise’s mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us?
When the Killing’s Done will offer no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle’s classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in a position to decide.
About the author
T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.
Anthony Heald, an Audie Award–winning narrator, has earned Tony nominations and an Obie Award for his theater work; appeared in television’s Law & Order, The X-Files, Miami Vice, and Boston Public; and starred as Dr. Frederick Chilton in the 1991 Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs. He has also won numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards for his narrations.
