MICHELE NORRIS, host: Writer Cormac McCarthy has a new book out, the first since the completion      of his border trilogy.  Alan Cheuse has a review of "No Country for Old      Men."</s>ALAN CHEUSE reporting: Like the novels in the border trilogy, this story straddles the      Texas-Mexico line and its still extraordinary, beautiful desert as one of      McCarthy's characters, a meditative sheriff named Bell, sees it:  `The      raw rock mountain, shadowed in the late sun, and to the east the      shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains      hung dark as soot all along the quadrant.'</s>ALAN CHEUSE reporting: But the meditative opening sequence from the point of view of Sheriff      Bell hints more at hopelessness than hope.  Looming large in the first      scene is a murderous sociopath named Anton Chigurh, a killer for hire      without a conscience, who's turned himself in to a sheriff's department      just to see if he can make his escape.  Within a page, Chigurh runs loose      in the world once again.  In the days, weeks and months that follow,      murder leads to murder, the innocent pulled in along with the more than      guilty and many in between.</s>ALAN CHEUSE reporting: McCarthy in his previous blood-steeped books seemed himself to follow no      rule but tell a good story, making beautiful prose however violent and      terrifying. With this new book he's broadened his vision.  `Hell is other      people,' Jean-Paul Sartre had a character announce in his play "No Exit."      When you hear Sheriff Bell meditate on his own life, you realize that      heaven is other people, too.</s>MICHELE NORRIS, host: The book is "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy.  Our      reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in      Fairfax, Virginia.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL (Host): This is NPR, National Public Radio.
Alan Cheuse reviews No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The novel opens up the world of a murderous sociopath in the desert straddling the Texas-Mexico border.