The colony of British Columbia, 1863. Boston Jim Milroy, a lone trapper and trader with an eidetic memory and a tragic unreckoned past, has become obsessed with reciprocating a seemingly minor kindness from the loquacious Dora Hume, a settler in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Dora's kindness and her life story both haunt Boston Jim, and his precise recollections inspire his attempts to buy something suitable for her in return. In The Reckoning of Boston Jim, his search eventually leads him to the gold rush town of Barkerville on the trail of Dora's capricious husband Eugene—the one thing, after all, that she really wants.