Host Jim Schumock speaks with T.C. Boyle about his thirteenth novel, When the Killing's Done, which takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels such as A Friend of the Earth and The Tortilla Curtain, and stories like “Carnal Knowledge,” “Top of the Food Chain,” “Tooth and Claw.” It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book. Boyle says that the novel "is a series of dramatic confrontations between those who say nay and those who say yea, but, as readers will I hope discover, such distinctions become increasingly more complex and ethically challenging. Just how precious is any given life—and who gets to decide?"
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