Dynamic content to CCK Node

Hello all,

I'm new to Drupal and haven't had any luck finding an answer to this question elsewhere so I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction.

I have several content types that I created through CCK. I also have related them using the Associated Nodes module. What I'd like to do is have partial lists of related nodes at the bottom of each page.

So, for example, say I have Book and Author content types. When viewing an Author node, I'd like to list the three most recent books the author is associated w/ at the bottom of the page, and then a "view more" link to a view I created that shows all the books related to the author.

I've managed to kludge something together using a few different types of Blocks and scraping from the URL (to determine whether its a book node and the block should be shown at all, and if so, which one.), but

a) it seems like there must be a more elegant solution that I'm missing, and
b) if the visitor views the site from its node id instead of its nice Path based URL, the whole system crumbles.

If anyone could point me in the right direction for this problem I'd greatly apprecaite it.

Thanks!