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Coffee is a telling marker in fiction of the frontier, from Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. So when we encounter eighteen-year-old Spencer Pearse, in 1892, drinking a mug of “black acrid” coffee in Spences Bridge, British Columbia, in the first chapter of Natalie Appleton’s Mad Hell-Rush of Days, we know instantly that this young man is our hero and we suspect that our author is one to be trusted. That inkling is confirmed on nearly every subsequent page of a near-perfect novel.

Spencer is one of two primary characters in this book, which moves back and forth between 1874 and 1943, a transformational period for the Cypress Hills, where much of the action unfolds. The other key player is Josie, known as Tippa Olson as a child and as Mrs. Clifford Grant after she marries in 1918. Throughout her life, Josie is haunted by something she did back in the...