The Serpent Bearer Published by Simon and Schuster on March 11, 2025 Genres: Fiction / Historical / 20th Century / World War II, Fiction / Jewish, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Pages: 256
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Goodreads
Part World War II spy thriller, part romance, and part tale of buried family secrets, The Serpent Bearer is perfect for fans of Kelly Rimmer’s The German Wife and Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network.
A suspenseful tale stretching from Spain to Hollywood, from a small Jewish community in South Carolina to a crumbling hacienda in the Yucatan, The Serpent Bearer carries readers into the lives of a glamorous British aristocrat, a Jewish gambler, and a beautiful Hollywood screenwriter—all swept up by dangerous political currents during WWII.
Solly Meisner, a Spanish Civil War veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, has barely settled in after his return home when he discovers powerful Nazi sympathizers are working behind the scenes in his new hometown of Pennington, South Carolina. Determined to stop them, he signs on with the Coordinating Office of Information (COI), a newly formed US spy agency. His first assignment: travel to the Yucatan and infiltrate a group of German spies and collaborators—including Estelle, a beautiful British woman he fell in love with in Spain, and whom he fears may have betrayed him.
In the Yucatan Solly encounters a band of European exiles, not all of them who they claim to be. With his contacts dropping like flies, danger lurks at every turn. But with the Nazis only a few hundred miles from the US coast and making plans for an invasion, there is no time to lose, and no one Solly trusts to track them down and stop them but himself. If he fails, the world he once knew will be gone forever—and the people he loves with it.
Review:
The Serpent Bearer delivers just what the blurb tells you it will: part World War II spy thriller, part romance, and part tale of buried family secrets. The novel is a historical fiction between the present, 2008, and 1941. Our main character, Solly, is 95 years old and sometimes slips into his past and has his daughter drive him to places she never heard of. Of course, this raises questions, and the whole story unfolds. How do you tell your daughter a different version of her birth story than she heard her entire life? How do you tell her the mom she always knows is not her mom?
Most importantly, how do you tell her you were involved in things you did not share and risk losing the image she always had of you? Serpent Bearer is a delightful tale that pulls ya right in from the first page and doesn’t let you tell all the story has been told. I enjoyed Solly’s whole backstory and how he tried to shake his daughter away from the truth. Solly is a delightful character, and I can see him in many older men I met with secrets like his, a shared history from the wars that they don’t want anyone to find out. Unfortunately, secrets don’t always stay buried. Serpent Bearer is out on March 11, 2025.
About Jane Rosenthal
Jane Rosenthal studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. She worked for NPR and California Public Radio before teaching radio production and English in public high schools in Oakland, California. For fifteen years, before relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Jane lived on a ranch in the Sierra mountains complete with horses and cattle, fulfilling her dream of being a western cowgirl. Now, she can be found exploring the many cultural offerings of her new home in New Mexico or traveling to her favorite pueblos mágicos in old Mexico when she’s not in her office with a window overlooking the Georgia O’Keeffe landscape around her and writing those novels that have been kicking around in her head all these many years.
This sounds like a great historical fiction! Although something about the cover made me wonder if it was science fiction at first. Great review!