North Country

By: Matt Bondurant

Narrated by: Jim Meskimen

A taut literary thriller set along the northern border, North Country explores the monsters frozen in the depths of the human soul.

North Chazy, New York is the heart of the North Country, a frigid region nestled against the Canadian border, characterized by the beautiful landscapes of the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain—plus a steady stream of Quebecois drugs flowing south, spirited by snowmobile across the ice.

Tom Kaiser, fresh off a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force, returns to North Chazy for his ailing father’s final days. It’s an uneasy homecoming—ever since his little sister was lost under the ice in mysterious circumstances when they were children, Kaiser has felt a terrible presence swimming in the deep.

Needing work, Kaiser falls in with Donnie LeClair, a slumlord, loan shark, and aesthete whose private collection of landscapes would rival a modest museum’s. Kaiser earns his keep roughing up unsavory locals who are late on their rent. But his true value is his aptitude for satellite telemetry, allowing him to find gaps in border surveillance, a useful skill for working with a Montreal kingpin who wants to move large quantities of ecstasy into the US.

As Kaiser spirals through the underbelly of drugs and crime, he finds the roots of evil run deep in the North Country—as bleak, impenetrable, and foreboding as the frozen lake.

©2025 Matt Bondurant (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

Outstanding!

Terrific story and narration. thank you, Don Winslow, for recommending this book on X. Ythe characters and setting are compelling.

Michigan Sauce Without the Kick

A fun read although a bit too scattered to be effective- I’m not sure this book is quite sure what it wants to be. Too many characters for me to truly feel invested in most of them or to make them feel more than one dimensional. The author tries to truly anchor the story in the North Country but beyond gratuitous local call-out’s (Stewart’s, slednecks, Pizza Bono, PAFB) it doesn’t quite « feel » like it takes place here in the North Country (see Escape at Dannemora or Frozen River for better representations). How can there be enough snow on the lake to both cross-country ski but also see under the ice?

Spoiler Alert:
Why are the antagonists in these Northern Borderlands stories always pretentious French-Canadian drug dealers? (See: Super Troopers 2, Frozen River, etc)