When fifteen-year-old Alice Sims's father is called to World War II and her mother is sequestered in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, she is sent from Philadelphia to stay with family in a once-sleepy Alabama town now transformed by the presence of a German Prisoner of War camp. Feeling she is no more welcome by the family she barely knows than the many "war people" who have come to town, Alice finds companionship with four other outsiders including one who lives on the other side of the barbed wire. Divided by race, religion, class, and nationality but connected by the music of the prisoners' orchestra, their lives fall into a routine they can hide until a murder exposes prejudices, tests loyalties, and raises moral dilemmas that alter the life of each member of the secret audience.