Oriel Van Dyke is a fourteen-year-old with a vivid imagination. Born into a quirky family of creatives, she dreams of one day making it in music. Though having grown up in Milford Orange-a tiny town that sits in a perpetual mist at the edge of a Coastal California estuary-she knows success won't be easy. Music is the only way she'll escape a dreaded career as a clerk in her mother's mayonnaise shop. Milford Orange is a town rich with eccentric characters, but none more so than Black Mars, the wealthy and mysterious man who owns the Jeopardy Grand Hotel and Ballroom. The Jeopardy is the big, leaky, boarded up building full of rats and bats and miles of tangled drainpipes in the center of town. When Oriel becomes entangled with Black and the Jeopardy, her dream of becoming a musician and one day living a more colorful existence outside of the mayonnaise shop becomes threatened.