"Breaking Point: A Joe Pickett Novel" (Putnam), by C.J. Box

In "Breaking Point," C.J. Box's 13th thriller featuring Wyoming game warden C.J. Pickett, our hero is still willing to mix it up to protect the wild landscape he loves and the colorful characters who roam it. But Joe has finally had all he can take of the desk jockeys who make his job harder than it ought to be.

Joe's mood grows still darker when he learns that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has ordered one of his friends, Butch Roberson, to stop building his dream house on a little plot of land near the eastern border of a ruggedly mountainous national forest. The EPA has declared the site a wetland, but Joe knows that it's dry, without even so much as a creek running through it.