My Latest Review… BEELITZ-HEILSTÄTTEN: Where Ghosts Never Die

What if rediscovering your birthplace unearthed a secret so powerful it could rewrite history—and your own identity?

A Russian-American writer obsessed with her birthplace – a ghostly derelict German military hospital near Berlin
Her Austrian husband, who pines for the father he never met
A passionate young doctor destined for darkness
A demonic figure who changed the course of history
Interrogation reports stolen from the Soviet secret police
What mysterious force connects them all?

This genre-bending time-slip narrative bridges 2018 to the haunting eras of WWI and WWII, interweaving together the ghosts of history and a shocking secret that threatens the present.

The story will appeal to fans of Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale.

About the author

Marina Osipova

Marina Osipova was born in East Germany into a military family and grew up in Russia, where she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. When she was five, she decided she wanted to speak German and, years later, she earned a diploma as a German language translator from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. In Russia, she worked first in a scientific-technical institute as a translator, then in a Government Ministry in the office of international relations, later for some Austrian firms. For many years, she lived in New York, working in a law firm, and then in Austria for several years. In the spring of 2022, after spending ten months in Russia, some unfortunate world events brought her back to the United States.

A long-standing member of the Historical Novel Society, she is dedicated to writing historical fiction, especially related to WWII. Her books garnered numerous literary awards, including a 1st Place WINNER of the 2021 Hemingway Book Awards novel competition for 20th Century Wartime Fiction (a division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards). At some point or another, all her books hit the Amazon Top 100 lists in Historical Russian Fiction and Historical German Fiction and How Dare the Birds Sing even #1 or #2 in War Fiction in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

Her readers praise her books for “emotional realism,” for “taking on a subject that few authors have touched,” for “writing with heart and compassion while not holding back from hard cold realities of war,” for “giving an authentic and in-depth look at a culture that tends to baffle westerners.”

To learn more about Marina Osipova and her captivating books, visit her website at marina-osipova.com.

You can find her also on

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marina.osipova.14/

My Review

 This book was recommended to me, but the cover was so intriguing, I probably would have read it anyway. 

The way Marina Osipova writes grabbed me from the very first sentence. The urgency, the compelling need to read, had me rushing through the book like lightning desperate to know where we were going and what we would find when we got there.

This is one of those books that you just can’t put down, not for a coffee break or a call of nature, well maybe that one!

Around the middle of this story, it became very dark, almost sinister. It had me looking around the room for shadows.

When a deep breath of evil joined this darkness, I wanted to put this book down, but I couldn’t. I finished reading this book with my fists clenched, my nails digging into my palms.

I honestly can’t say I enjoyed this book, but I am glad I read it…