Excerpt from The Last Grand Duchess by Bryn Turnbull, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Father Grigori. What would he say, if he were here now? If he weren't cold under the Russian soil, his mutilated body barely able to fit into a casket?

If you want him gone, say the word. Simply say it, and I will make it so.

"What will we do?" said Olga. "What do we tell the others?"

Mamma shook her head. "We tell them nothing." She pulled a bottle of veronal from the folds of her skirt, not bothering to mix the crystals into water before setting them beneath her tongue. "They don't need to know a thing until they're well again. Circumstances might be different by then." She closed her eyes as the opiate took effect, then resumed writing, her pen scratching across the page: Dearest Nicky, if what they're saying is true...

"How?" said Olga. She could see her mother slipping into the mania that had driven her for months, the mania which had reached new heights since Father Grigori's death. "Papa has signed his crown over to Uncle Mikhail. There is no going back."

Mamma looked up, her pen pooling ink as it stilled on the page. "Your father is the tsar. It is a God-given responsibility; it cannot be taken away."

They'd gone down to the courtyard shortly afterward to visit the Cossacks on duty at the front gate, their collars upturned against the cold. Mamma had spoken to each soldier in turn, grasping their hands in a show of solidarity, asking, with motherly concern, whether they were warm enough, whether their families were safe. Olga had followed, looking past the soldiers she considered friends to the blackness beyond the palace gates. Who was waiting there, in the woods, with bayonets and rifles, ready to fire on her family? Were these soldiers enough to keep civil war at bay?

"Olga?" Tatiana pulled Olga from her recollections, her gentle face creasing into a frown. At the other end of the playroom, Mamma was speaking to Alexei, her voice low.

"It's Papa," Olga replied. "He's—he's coming to see us. Very soon."

Excerpted from The Last Grand Duchess by Bryn Turnbull. Copyright © 2022 by Bryn Turnbull. Excerpted by permission of Mira. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.