National Book Launch via Zoom: Smuggler: Drugs, Gangs, and Refugees at America's Northern Border

Oct 20, 04:00 PM Pacific Time - This book launch event for Smuggler: Drugs, Gangs, and Refugees at America's Northern Border will be hosted by Laurie Trautman of Western Washington University and will include a discussion with authors Reece Jones and Greg Boos. Bob Boulé will join as a special guest. Interested parties can register to attend at: Webinar Registration - Zoom

 

 

Publishers Weekly has named Smuggler as one of the Big Indie Books for Fall 2026. Inkstick media  calls it a most anticipated book of 2026.

 

,Smuggler documents the local story behind Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. ___ (2022), the Supreme Court decision by Justice Clarence Thomas that erased remedies for constitutional violations made by federal officers.

 

Set in Blaine, Washington, directly on the US–Canada border, the book centers on Bob Boulé, an innkeeper whose bed-and-breakfast serves as a gathering place for refugees, smugglers, drug traffickers, and federal agents. People from all sides of the border trust Bob with their secrets.

 

Refugees share harrowing accounts of persecution, violence, and loss. Drug traffickers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents each attempt to draw Bob into their side of the high-stakes world of cross-border smuggling. As he navigates competing loyalties and mounting pressures, Bob becomes entangled in the complex human and criminal dynamics of life at the border.
 

After a violent confrontation with a Border Patrol agent, Bob’s complaint goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose (adverse) landmark decision in Egbert v. Boule paves the way for the apparent impunity of ICE agents on American streets in the second presidency of Donald Trump. 

Drawing on exclusive interviews and firsthand legal experience, Smuggler shows how federal immigration enforcement reaches ordinary communities and reshapes daily life at the border. It examines the convergence of smuggling networks and asylum seekers, revealing the legal, human, and geopolitical stakes of cross-border movement in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Rooted in a real place familiar to regional readers, Smuggler  offers a close, unsettling look at how national policy plays out on local ground. Given ICE and Border Patrol shootings this last year, this book is of national significance.  

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"In Smuggler, Reece Jones and Greg Boos have crafted something rare: a page-turner of car chases, gang deals and Supreme Court battles that is also, at its heart, a penetrating, empathetic meditation on conscience, complicity, and how hard it is to do the right thing when the law and your humanity push in opposite directions. Timely, stranger-than-fiction, and impossible to put down – truly a book for our dizzying moment." 

 

“Smuggler is a gripping crime thriller that compels readers to keep turning the pages. But it tells a much bigger story about how the United States has morphed from a country that once opened its arms to those fleeing persecution and violence into one that now targets them, and those like Bob Boule brave enough to help.”

 

"Smuggler is a truth-stranger-than-fiction story that captures all of the complexity of American border security and immigration politics. Packed with unforgettable characters, Reece Jones and Greg Boos help shine an important spotlight on the little-understood and little-covered challenges of the northern border, where some of the nation's oddest crimes have long occurred."

 

“Smuggler is a must-read true story of a larger-than-life man grappling with the moral complexities of his actions. Reece Jones and Greg Boos offer a fascinating glimpse into migration in the era of asylum and lay bare the complicated reality of border law enforcement, revealing how accountability for federal misconduct can be elusive.” 

 

“Smuggler is a real-life thriller that proves the adage that fact is stranger than fiction. Jones and Boos deliver a hard-edged story about one man’s survival on the longest undefended border in the world. Bob Boule and his Smuggler’s Inn provide a vivid setting for the personal, cultural, and legal struggles swirling around our so-called ’forgotten’ U.S.–Canadian border. Highly recommended!” 

 

“An engrossing legal thriller. Bob Boulé's story demonstrates how the enforcement of border and immigration laws – from the front line all the way to the Supreme Court – is violent, deceptively characterizing people as criminals, threats, and unsavory beings. Smuggler explains how ICE and Border Patrol agents have incredibly wide powers and broad immunity for their brutal behavior and forces us to ask what kind of society we want to live in and what rules should govern us."

 

“Smuggler is a gripping and timely account that shatters the myth of a benign northern frontier, revealing the Canada–US border as a site of violence, impunity, and refuge. It offers an unforgettable portrait of Bob Boulé and the Smuggler's Inn, where asylum seekers, drug networks, and security agencies collide in the most ordinary of spaces. By weaving together gangland hits, confidential informant files, and midnight crossings through a Blaine backyard, the book traces Bob's deepening compassion for the refugees fleeing persecution at his door, even as the Safe Third Country regime forecloses the very pathways to protection they seek.”