When the U.S. entered the Second Word War, the Roosevelt administration, hoping to spark benign treatment for American diplomats trapped abroad, sequestered the personnel of Axis embassies in luxury hotels. In his engaging history of this largely forgotten episode, Solomon, a D.C.-based freelance writer and author of Book of Days, recreates the tense atmosphere surrounding the controversial decision and traces its outcome by profiling five of the hundreds of German, Japanese, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian diplomats, families, staff, servants, journalists, students, businessmen, and spies who were eventually repatriated after doing their time, variously, in the Greenbrier, the Homestead, the Grove Park Inn, and the Hotel Hershey.