Anybody read these-Queen's Shadow, Queen's Peril, Queen's Hope? They're from the YA line but generally those novels have been pretty hiqh quality compared with some of Bantam's/Del Rey offerings (although some of those were OK). The last in the series, set around ROTS, came out a few weeks ago.
Basically they sort of deal with a lot of the gaps between the films and flesh out Padme a bit more, as well as the Handmaidens-in particular Sabe, the decoy Queen played by Keira Knightley, who is currently in Greg Pak's Vader comics.
There's also plenty of Palpatine's scheming to boot.