ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: The novel is called "When the Killing's Done," and Alan Cheuse has our review.</s>ALAN CHEUSE: Even as the death of one of the animal rights activists turns this novel darker and darker, the natural setting remains what it has always been. Read this engaging and lively and timely story, with the truths on both sides of the human arguments neatly dramatized, weighed and balanced, and a wild homage to the power of the natural world.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: The book is called "When the Killing's Done" by T.C. Boyle. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
In the tradition of some California-based novelists of the 20th century, T.C. Boyle has taken up large social questions and presented them with intensity and, sometimes, intense irony. In his new novel, When the Killing's Done, the intensity grows out of a series of battles.