When the Killing's Done
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Anthony Heald
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By:
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T. C. Boyle
About this listen
From the best-selling 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 new 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?
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Editorial reviews
From the moment Anthony Heald begins reading When the Killing’s Done, the energy of the novel bursts to life, creating an experience that will have lucky listeners believing that they have survived shipwrecks, chased feral pigs through the underbrush of island wilderness, faced the wrath of hostile protesters, and dined with one of the most irritating individuals ever.
So vibrant is T.C. Boyle’s prose that Heald has a seemingly limitless reservoir of characters and experiences from which to draw. The novel pits passionate animal rights activists against the park service ecologists who are equally passionate about preserving the flora and fauna of the Channel Islands, located just off the coast of California near between Ventura and Santa Barbara. When the Killing’s Done manages to state the case for each side while pointing out the hypocrisies inherent in trying to maintain a black-and-white, take-no-prisoners adherence to any cause.
Where Boyle excels and Heald triumphs is in the vivid descriptions of life on the islands of Anacapa and Santa Cruz and the voyages various characters, past and present, have made to the islands’ rocky shores. Heald’s performance of the wreck of the Beverly B and survival of Beverly Boyd, grandmother of the novel’s female protagonist, Alma Boyd Takasue, will have listeners reaching out to walls or handrails to steady themselves, so realistic is the depiction of the capsizing. There are idyllic journeys led by coastal dolphins and furtive cat-and-mouse chases between activists and Coast Guard boats. Heald relays the imagery in such a realistic manner that sounds and smells of the open ocean are palpable to the mind.
Heald’s tour-de-force is his characterization of wealthy, self-absorbed animal rights activist David LaJoy, a man of unrelenting ego who has embraced his cause with the unbridled zealotry of the newly converted. The man has the money to make his desires reality and the personality to insist upon it. Witheringly rude to all he considers beneath him, mostly everyone, LaJoy is an extremist whose commitment veers off into deadly irrationality. Boyle playfully jabs at LaJoy and Heald perfectly captures the outraged exasperation as the animal rights activist sees his newly-sodded lawn done in by invasive raccoons. An equal opportunity jabber, Boyle also has a final zing for Park Service biologist Takasue as well.
Heald’s tempo and energy keep When the Killing’s Done constantly bounding forward. Boyle’s writing is so crisp and Heald’s delivery so exuberant that listening to the audiobook will be a temporary obsession for all who choose it. Carole Chouinard
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- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Recently widowered and grieving, Gavin flees New York City for the quiet of the country. His new home on Lake Caldasac has surprisingly few visitors, and the author soon learns why: a suspiciously high number of people have gone missing in the small town. The deaths have all been ruled accidents, but Finn Horn, a handicapped boy obsessed with fishing, knows the truth. There’s a monster in the lake. And it wants to feed.
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Interesting and fun
- By Bob on 01-14-13
By: Robert Pobi
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The Dead Cat Bounce
- By: Sarah Graves
- Narrated by: Lindsay Ellison
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Since she bought her rambling fixer-upper of a house, Jacobia Tiptree has gotten used to finding things broken. But her latest problem isn't so easily repaired. Along with the rotting floor joists and sagging support beams, there's the little matter of the dead man in Jake's storeroom, an ice pick planted firmly in his cranium. Jake's unknown guest turns out to be local boy turned billionaire Threnody McIlwaine.
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too slow of a story...
- By Annette on 03-13-18
By: Sarah Graves
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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
- By: Hannah Tinti
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past - a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.
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Odd choice for narrator
- By lindsey b. on 01-23-19
By: Hannah Tinti
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Carousel Tides
- Archer's Beach, Book 1
- By: Sharon Lee
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Kate Archer returns home in search of her missing grandmother Bonny, and to serve as guardian of the town's amusement park until her return… only the carousel animals are really exiles from the faerie world. And not the nice kind of exiles either - no, these are hardened criminals.
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Good Narrator, Good Book
- By Rose on 12-05-10
By: Sharon Lee
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The Shell Collector
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's acclaimed debut collection take listeners from the African coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties - metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts - and conjures nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power.
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Narrator not appropriate to the book.
- By Janet on 02-18-17
By: Anthony Doerr
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Track of the Cat
- By: Nevada Barr
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the vivid opening vista, high in craggy mountains, to the final haunting glimpse of a moonlit canyon, Nevada Barr's first mystery, Track of the Cat, instantly caught the attention of readers and reviewers. Its popularity gained it both an Agatha and an Anthony Award.
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Guadalupe Mountain Mystery
- By Sara on 10-15-15
By: Nevada Barr
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Cool Blue Tomb
- By: Paul Kemprecos
- Narrated by: Barry Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Paul Kemprecos' first mystery novel, Cool Blue Tomb, introduces Aristotle "Soc" Socarides - part-time fisherman, part-time private eye, full-time philosopher. In his inaugural outing, Soc is swimming with the sharks - only problem is, he's the bait.
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You will love this. It's that simple.
- By Pete on 10-29-11
By: Paul Kemprecos
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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The New Moon's Arms
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Gin Hammond
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.
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What a joy
- By newmoon on 07-05-19
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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To Speak for the Dead
- Jake Lassiter Legal Thrillers, Book 1
- By: Paul Levine
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Defending a surgeon in a malpractice case, Jake Lassiter begins to suspect that his client is innocent of negligence...but guilty of murder. Add a sexy widow, a deadly drug, and a grave robbery to the stew, and you have Miami's trial of the century.
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Jake Lassiter is not your typical hero...
- By shelley on 03-30-17
By: Paul Levine
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The Fireman
- A Novel
- By: Joe Hill
- Narrated by: Kate Mulgrew
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies - before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
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GOD'S WAITING ROOM; AKA FLORIDA
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-25-17
By: Joe Hill
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Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
- By: Jonathan Evison
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything - his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving taught in the basement of a local church. There Ben is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability and how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to 19-year-old Trev, he discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him.
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Unlike!
- By Pamela Harvey on 01-02-13
By: Jonathan Evison
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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
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Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful boyfriend, Cat decides that she needs a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry.” But when the budding social influencer finally gives in to impulse, buying a Burmese python from a local pet shop, she sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire events that culminates in one of the most memorable denouements in recent fiction, one that ensnares her entire family, from her eco-obsessed parents, Ottilie and Frank, to her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd.
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Classic T.C. Boyle Novel
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A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct.
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ok
- By Luke on 04-26-07
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Talk to Me
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When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it. What if it were possible to speak to the members of another species - to converse with them?
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Themes Better Covered Elsewhere
- By Indyquaz on 12-11-21
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In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.”
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Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful boyfriend, Cat decides that she needs a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry.” But when the budding social influencer finally gives in to impulse, buying a Burmese python from a local pet shop, she sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire events that culminates in one of the most memorable denouements in recent fiction, one that ensnares her entire family, from her eco-obsessed parents, Ottilie and Frank, to her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd.
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ok
- By Luke on 04-26-07
By: T. C. Boyle
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
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- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
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Tooth and Claw
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Enjoyable collection of stories
- By Mary on 10-30-06
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Lie
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- Unabridged
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Lonnie is tired. He's tired of his job, the monotony of it, and tired of the predictability ofhis home life now that he's a father. It's a day like every other day, and hecan't face the inevitability of it all. So he lies. It's a small lie, but heknows small lies become big ones. He knows it as soon as he says his daughteris in the hospital. But he can't stop himself, and he can't stop the lie fromtaking on a life of its own.
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I didn’t want it to end.
- By Terry Vogel on 11-04-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Riven Rock
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- Unabridged
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It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him.
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not riveting
- By SB on 09-29-24
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Terranauts
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Lynde Houck, Joy Osmanski, Charlie Thurston
- Length: 20 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, 40 miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the Earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the Terranauts, have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-Earth colony. Their sealed three-acre compound comprises five biomes - rain forest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh - and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them.
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Aggravating Narrator Ruins Great Book
- By Laura Coen on 12-02-16
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Tortilla Curtain
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacker lead an ordered, sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: He is a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine.
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What a talented author & narrator!
- By Julie on 09-13-06
By: T. C. Boyle
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Outside Looking In
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
What listeners say about When the Killing's Done
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-05-11
Flawed but Good Read
This was my first T. C. Boyle book to read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its rather glaring flaws. A picture is worth a thousand words and in Boyle’s case that picture is very finely focused. If crisp literary description is not your thing, you are likely to finds this book tedious.
Despite all of the fine description these characters remain rather one dimensional and predictable. He seems to set out with a literary device that he does not have patience to fully develop. Two of his characters get the embellishment of lineage. Despite the context of parents and grandparents, these characters remain of rather limited dimension. Furthermore, the author seems to tire of the device and does not stick with it very well.
He sets out on the noble path to show two sides of a complex issue but there, too, he fails. His amazing power of description just does not extend as well to character or context. One side of the story gets many more pages, more context and less villainous characters. Despite himself the author takes a side.
But, for me, his ability to describe, not just the physical world, but perception of it, is well worth the structural problems. In fact, I found it surprising and interesting that he could describe perception so well without emotional complexity. Emotion is viewed through the same objective lens as a foggy coast line.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Amazon Customer
- 03-13-11
Worth the effort
An icy narrative lacking the intimacy and high drama of prior yarns. Even the caddish Frank Lloyd Wright ("The Women") exacts more compassion than anyone in this book (except Anise's mother, who disappears). Never completely sold on the science or ethics, which come across muddled. Anthony Heald surely shines, but would have preferred the author himself reading it with less fanfare. Doesn't come close to "The Tortilla Curtain," which put the reader, not wild hogs, in the crosshairs. Does offer the usual, brilliant, unparalleled descriptions and narration one expects from T. C. Boyle, making it worth the effort; but, alas, a rimshot compared to his previous masterworks of moral reckoning.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- W.Denis
- 03-18-11
Worth the time spent
If you want to know what kind of mustard was in the sandwitch, or whether the eggs were runny or semi-hard boiled or how the bark of a eucalyptus tree looks pay close attention, its all here. But the plethora of detail only delays a very good story with great charactors and a noble theme. The one star downgrade is only for having to wade through five minutes of how you run over a squirrel with your car.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Clovis
- 01-15-15
Master-crafted writing
Intricately-woven story keeps the reader going and brings out the biases of players on opposite sides in environmental issues in the Channel Islands off the California coast
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Sheryl
- 06-07-11
Hmmmmm...!
I wish T.C. would get out of his maudlin state. I keep reading his books, hoping to find some of the funny dark side of life, like "Drop City," but I guess he is stuck in the dark absurd state. Anyway, it was an okay read and the narrator was good.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Virginia
- 09-24-12
Educational and humorous and incredible
T.C. Boyle is one of the most creative imaginative writers this world has known. The way he words some of the most simple mundane things makes me giggle and emphasize. He covers topics that we can walk away with feeling like we actually learned something. This man is truly gifted. At first the narrator drove me crazy with his fast paced downer style. But then by the end, I realize that no one else could have pulled this off better. Just the right personality. Still, though, I wish he would have slowed it down a pace, especially in the beginning while we are still trying to grasp the story.
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Overall
- mary
- 04-23-11
One of Boyle's best novels
I found this novel to be interesting on many levels -- the way the author weaves the history of the Channel Islands with the stories of the main characters and their families, the struggle to decide what and who is "right", the strength of nature as seen in the power of the ocean and the rain and the will of animals to survive (and of humans to decide and influence that survival). I'm not a fan of Boyle's historical novels (e.g., The Women, Road to Wellville), so I was happy when this more fictional novel came out, and I wasn't disappointed. I compare it to Drop City and Talk Talk as recent favorites from Boyle. I thought the narrator was good, with a bit of cynicism and touch of accent where you would expect it.
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2 people found this helpful
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- SIMON
- 11-20-12
Great book, not so great narrator.
I really enjoyed the book, but I did NOT like the narrators voice. It was much too rough and scraggly, even hard to follow at times. Apart from the qualities of the narrators voice he made a good performance at narrating.
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Overall
- Amanda Burke
- 03-20-11
The narration diminished the stars
I'm a great fan of T.C. Boyle. I enjoyed the tale and probably would have given it 4 stars, but for the narrator. I find Heald's voice and tone grating, but that actually worked with this somewhat grating subject matter and not very sympathetic characters. However, using that tone of voice when mispronouncing words like "quay" and "dais" just makes him sound pompous and undereducated. Not a good quality in a professional narrator. (Pretty easy to check pronunciation these days with online dictionaries.)
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Nan Holt
- 05-14-11
Whoops....
I have not finished listening, but am already distracted because someone didn't proofread or check the continuity. Anise went up the courthouse steps in "all white, down to her red vinyl boots..". and a few minutes later, Dave was ranting about why she was dressed all in black. Must have done a switch in the loo!
That said, I found the subject interesting but it is not a book I would listen to again.
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