Breaking Point by C.J. Box

Breaking Point by C.J. Box

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had a few problems with this. It's a good story, but with some serious, and some not so serious, errors that made it really hard to buy the whole plot. I'd give it 3 stars for the story, if not for the fact that the circumstances that kick it off are so unbelievable.

We start with two (armed) EPA agents travelling to small town Wyoming to serve papers—papers that should have been served a year earlier—the men promptly turn up dead. The crime that the EPA is fighting is supposedly the illegal development of a wetland: except that everybody knows there is no such wetland. So we're asked to believe that, first, the EPA has ordered a developer (verbally) to stop work on a "wetland" and to restore it to its natural condition immediately, and that fines of $70,000 a day will be imposed until the site is restored.  In an afterword, Box says that this has really happened to a couple named Sackett in Idaho, and as far as it goes, this is true. However, in the Sackett's case, nobody—except perhaps the Sacketts—denies that the property really was a wetland and a compliance order was issued, which latter didn't happen in this fictional version.  It's also true that only the EPA can define what constitutes a wetland under the Clean Water Act, and that they claimed the Sacketts had no right of appeal. The US Supreme court ruled that they did have a right of appeal in March 2012, well before this book was published. So, really, no, I don't think the scenario described here could have happened.

For the far less consequential, we're told this town is too small to have even one taxi, but a young hooligan that Joe Pickett is looking for is the son of an Episcopalian Bishop. You think? My experience is that Episcopal diocesan seats are in rather larger centres. In Wyoming's case, that's Caspar: population 55,000.

Towards the end of the book, Joe's riding a log down a river that even the best whitewater kayakers only tackle in the spring runoff. That's not the way it works, Mr. Box: if it's dangerous in August, it's worse when the water's high. Think about it. There's more water, moving faster, in the
spring runoff than during the dry part of summer : Energy = ½mass*velocity²  — more energy = more danger.

So, that's all a long winded way of saying that I was pretty short on the willing suspension of disbelief.

Outside of that, I enjoyed it….