Perpetually anxious, socially isolated Clara Young is plunged headfirst into a whole new environment when she leaves the safe anonymity of the big city for the tiny mountain town of Temperance, where everyone knows everyone and no one ever leaves. Her mother, Paula, has gone missing, and now she must live with the extended family she never knew, in a town her mother had never wanted to return to.

Clara makes a valiant attempt to integrate and maintain a normal life, but the mystery of her mother’s disappearance weighs on her. After a boy she went on a disastrous date with turns up murdered, she learns that she has just moved to a town with a grisly history.

Stuck in the middle of a new crop of killings, she befriends the local outcast, a surly young man named John Savage. Clara uncovers that her mother had an unfortunate connection to the last cluster of killings the year she was born.

Positive that her mother’s disappearance is connected to the town’s dark past, she desperately tries to find anything that might return her mother to her. Instead, Clara finds that her mother is just as shrouded in mystery as the little town itself.

TEMPERANCE is a YA mystery with Southern Gothic roots.