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.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Jane Rosenthal’s The Serpent Bearer, which is out March 11th 2025.
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.
1
Solly
Havana, Cuba
August 1941
You could put Solly Meisner in a glued-together Soviet Tupole bomber, flying somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid, dodging Franco’s antiaircraft fire, ascending and descending like a rubber ball, and he wouldn’t break a sweat. Didn’t break a sweat, as a matter of fact. But force him to sit around with nothing to do but kill time, twiddling his thumbs? Now that gave him the heebie-jee-bies. Too much time on his hands and he’d start to think, and too much thinking always brought him right back to Spain, to that dank basement, waiting for radio communication from the front while Nationalists’ bombs pounded Madrid, a communiqué that never came. Turns out you could raise your fist and shout No pasarán! All you wanted, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
Solly knew he’d never forget that night, never forget the smell, all those men crammed together, perspiring like dogs in the dark cellar of a villa near the Parque del Buen Retiro. The villa’s owner, some marqués who’d met his match in the form of a Republican firing squad, was no longer around to enjoy his wine collection stacked along the walls, the rare bottles of rioja Solly’s camaradas were indulging in. Solly had been too wound up to swill from the bottles. The smell of piss where the men had urinated in the corner, the sweat,
and the sharp whiff of wine had nauseated him.
He’d bolted, claustrophobic and desperate for some fresh air, leav ing his post in the hands of a kid from Boston named Howie, telling him he just needed five minutes. When the bomb hit the villa, he’d been sitting on a park bench with his eyes closed, thinking he had all the time in the world. For that simple fact, he was still alive, waiting once again for an unknown danger and a chance to make it up to Howie and all the others. There were so goddamn many of them, weren’t there?
Solly lay on the bed and stared at the rotating ceiling fan in his room, a jazzy rumba drifting up from the veranda cocktail lounge five stories below, waiting, his heart hammering in his chest as it had been from the moment he’d pushed his passport across the reception desk at the Hotel Nacional and signed in. Seven in the evening Cuba time.
He had waved away a disappointed bellhop who’d been hoping for a big tip and lifted his own suitcase. It was light, and if anyone had really been paying attention at customs, his clothing would have raised suspicions: a warm coat, a heavy sweater, hardly a wardrobe
for the tropics. But customs officials hadn’t even opened it. To them he was just one more American ready to enjoy the playground of the Caribbean.
Good, he’d thought. I’ve passed that test.
Back in the States, he’d been told they would contact him when they were ready, and now he wondered who they were, wondered if he should be worried as he filled up the thick glass ashtray on the nightstand with one Pall Mall cigarette after another. Maybe this was some kind of setup. He closed his eyes, better to remember every face, every encounter he’d had since last night, searching them for clues.
Which one was his handler? The desk manager? Nope, not him. Too much hair pomade to be a contact, too flashy. The waiter who’d delivered his room service meal? Hadn’t he looked at Solly a certain way, as if to memorize his face should he need to? Solly sat up and pulled open the nightstand’s drawer. Jesus, the Gideon Bible even here. He slammed the drawer shut and stared at the black phone beside the bed. He’d been in Havana for twenty hours now and was starting to fear that it never would ring, that this rendezvous would end, just like the other one had ended three years ago in Lisbon when it dawned on him with sickening clarity that Estelle wouldn’t be joining him, that the ship’s passage he’d secured for her was for naught, and that after all that had happened in Spain, he would return to the States defeated and alone, one more death to mourn.
Estelle.
Solly shook himself as if he’d just walked through cobwebs, got up, headed to the window, and peered down to the garden below where women in gauzy picture hats floated like water lilies in the damp air, lifting their champagne coupes to their painted lips, their laughter as buzzy as their drinks. All things come to those who wait, his mother used to say, back when he was in knee pants when things to come were always good things. He’d learned that lesson—that they weren’t—the hard way.
It was dusk by the time Solly heard the knock on the door. His wait, or at least this part of it, was over. The concierge was all smiles as he carried a garment bag to Solly’s closet, chattering that the Hotel Nacional had the best presser, that he hoped his shoes were polished sufficiently, and oh, here was a note from this evening’s hosts, and was there anything else he would need?
“Nothing,” Solly said, reaching into his pocket for a few Cuban pesos, quite a few more than was probably necessary. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was buying with his generosity, but better to be on the safe side.
As soon as he’d shut the door, he tore open the envelope and read the letter, unsigned of course. The instructions were scant, but they were instructions that he would follow to a tee. He sat on the bed and stared at the closet for a moment before he got up and checked his tuxedo and dress shirt. And, just as he’d been told to do in the note, he paid special attention to the gold cuff links gleaming on his dress shirt’s sleeves. He stuck his fingernail into the ridge along the side of one. Sure enough, it opened. Inside was just enough chloral hydrate to knock someone out. He knew from Spain that it could come in handy.
At 11:00 p.m. Solly Meisner, no longer an Abraham Lincoln brigadista but now a spy, dressed in his tuxedo and cummerbund, resplendent from his black tie to his black brogues, his hair slicked back, his mustache trimmed, pushed through the polished brass doors of the Hotel Nacional’s gilded casino. The roar of spinning roulette wheels washed over him like a wave. He wandered the elegant gaming room with a studied nonchalance, taking in the enormous crystal chandeliers that scattered light over the gamblers, the heavy gold brocade curtains swooning above Jazz Moderne style window frames, the rich, flocked wallpaper, and the well-heeled, perfumed ladies like any tourist enthralled by Cuba’s corrupt glamour. All the while, he assumed his presence would be made known to whomever was there to collect him.
After a few rounds, he headed to the cashier’s cage to buy his chips. Solly hadn’t felt this full of adrenaline and maybe even fear in, well, he didn’t know how long. And considering all he’d been through the past year, the deadness he’d slogged through each day, fear was a relief. He had a gun in his suitcase and he had his marching orders: get a pocketful of chips and place an inside bet—a split, just enough risk and a high payout. The chandeliers sparkled, the laughter ebbed and flowed, the click of the roulette wheels sounded like bullets, and Solly knew just who he was aiming for: Eton, his British camarada from Spain, a Nazi-sympathizing agent all along. The bastard.
“Eleven and twenty-three, split,” he told the croupier.
“Hedging your bets I see,” said a voice from behind his shoulder, a woman’s voice, one he’d never expected. “Don’t turn around,” she said. “It’s bad luck. Just let the wheel spin.”
