On 1st July 2024, a new book by the President and founder of the SEARCH Foundation Peter Sarandinaki will be published. Sarandinaki is best known as one of the participants who discovered the remains of Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna in 2007. He has spent many years searching for the remains of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich and his secretary Nikolai Johnson.

His new book In Search of the Romanovs: A Family’s Quest to Solve One of History’s Most Brutal Crimes will no doubt become one of the most highly anticipated books for Romanovophiles to be published in many years!

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In 1918 a famed general of the Russian White Army battled through the Red Army to save Emperor Nicholas II—but he arrived too late. The Romanovs had already been murdered.

In this thrilling true-life detective story, we follow Anna, the general’s courageous young daughter, who fled across the continent and boarded a ship with her husband to escape the bloodshed. Beneath her bunk was a box, and in this box lay grisly evidence of what had become of Russia’s royal family, the Romanovs. Generations later, Anna’s grandson Peter Sarandinaki set out to finish his great-grandfather’s mission to find the Romanovs’ remains, enlisting searchers and scientists to finally piece together the answers to some of history’s most perplexing questions: What really happened to Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, and their children? And what about the tsar’s brother, Michael, who simply disappeared?

Set against the disparate backdrops of the Russian Revolution and the twenty-first century’s leading DNA laboratories, In Search of the Romanovs weaves together historical records, forensic science, and the diaries, recollections, and experiences of Sarandinaki’s own family. Follow Sarandinaki as he fits together the final fragments of the mystery: a piece of topaz jewelry, a blood-stained shirt once worn by Tsar Nicholas II, the fabled Solokov box, and his team finding clandestine initials carved into a tree. A riveting and deeply personal story, In Search of the Romanovs reveals hidden truths in the legends about the murder and disappearance of Russia’s most famous royal family.

© Paul Gilbert. 31 October 2023