End of weekend roundup

So, I spent part of the last couple of days rereading books from Maureen Peters' Falcon Saga, and I'd forgotten how truly evil some of her characters were (talk about characters you love to hate, yow). They're still good reads.

Just a few small things I wanted to post before I forgot:

A couple posts back, people were wondering what Carolly Erickson's The Tsarina's Daughter was about. According to St. Martin's Press's fall catalog, it is indeed about Tatiana - the cover told the truth for a change - and is what I'd properly call an alternate history, although it's not labeled as such. The blurb begins as follows: "Daria Gradov is an elderly grandmother living in the rural West in the 1980s. What neighbors and even her children don't know, however, is she began her life as the Grand Duchess Tatiana, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra..." Then it describes her romance with a young soldier. By now, I believe three of the Romanov daughters have had fictional escapes, all but Olga (who never made it out of Catherine Gavin's The Snow Mountain alive).

Yesterday I received a request from a researcher in search of the real name of pseudonymous novelist Alexandra Hamilton, who wrote an obscure trilogy about Nefertiti for the British publisher Muller in the late 1970s. According to jacket blurbs, Alexandra Hamilton was the byline for a well-known author at the time. The researcher's been trying to hunt down her identity for the past couple of decades, and I wasn't able to find discover anything, so if anyone reading this knows who she is, please leave a comment. The novels are, for the record: Nefertiti: The Beautiful One; Nefertiti: The Devious Being, and Nefertiti: The Lady of Grace. I own them but haven't read them.

On Friday I updated the HNS forthcoming books page with fall titles from Macmillan (which includes St. Martin's, Tor/Forge, FSG, Minotaur, Picador, and a couple other publishers/imprints) and Soho Press. Soho has a fascinating list if you're into mysteries with an international flair. There's something weird going on with the HNS page now, it's not showing the right-hand borders, which means I need to go play with it.

Also, for anyone going to BEA this week, if you have the chance to grab Selden Edwards' The Little Book at the Penguin booth, I recommend you do so.