The Girl Who Rode the White Lion

A hidden truth, a relentless pursuit, and a story history could not silence

Germany, 1938. On the eve of war, as Nazi violence engulfs Jewish homes and businesses, young Sarah Frank escapes an SS officer whose obsession with her family turns deadly. Forced into a world suddenly stripped of safety and certainty, she finds refuge in a traveling circus-an unlikely sanctuary of lion trainers, acrobats, elephants, and outsiders who become her family. Under their protection, Sarah discovers a courage she never knew she possessed, even as the Nazi grip tightens and the man she fled closes in.

New York City, 1957. A routine autopsy at the city zoo uncovers a chilling object inside an elderly lion: a silver SS ring engraved with a skull. For chief veterinarian Mark Spencer, the discovery ignites a transatlantic search that leads through postwar Paris, Tel Aviv, and the shadowed corners of New York-toward the buried story of a girl who dared to challenge an unfathomable evil.