Aimee Massey (Author of Odric The Bold)

Aimee Massey rated a book liked it Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely. Well researched? Check. Interesting? Check. Honest? Well, now, that's complicated. By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot o ...more
12 hours, 2 min ago · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Black Dahlia by William J. Mann. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Black Dahlia by William J. Mann <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey rated a book liked it Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely. Well researched? Check. Interesting? Check. Honest? Well, now, that's complicated. By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot o ...more
12 hours, 40 min ago · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Black Dahlia by William J. Mann. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Black Dahlia by William J. Mann <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey made a comment on James Hodge’s review of Stolen " A gaiter can refer to both a type of fabric shoe/leg covering or a fabric tube-thing that you put around your neck and can pull up to protect your fac ...more "
Feb 02, 2026 06:40PM · see review
Aimee Massey and 1 other person liked Darcia Helle's review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood: "I’d love to give this book 5 stars just for the depth of research done by the author. But, apologies, I found it tedious. While an author needs all that research in order to tell a complete story, we readers do not need to know every single detail un" Read more of this review »
Feb 02, 2026 09:14AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Black Dahlia by William J. Mann. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Black Dahlia by William J. Mann <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey made a comment on Holly’s review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood " I have to agree with your assessment of Elizabeth Short. The author is trying just a bit too hard to rescue her image, but so far (I've only started r ...more "
Feb 01, 2026 05:48PM · see review
Aimee Massey and 2 other people liked Holly's review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood: "I was hoping this new novel would bring more conclusive and previously undivulged information that would suggest closure in this very cold, but interesting case. The author certainly spent a good deal of time doing his research, working up a picture " Read more of this review »
Feb 01, 2026 05:40PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Black Dahlia by William J. Mann. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Black Dahlia by William J. Mann <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey and 6 other people liked Maria Ryan's review of All the Fcking Mistakes: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life: "All the Fcking Mistakes is a childish and raunchy rant about all things sex. The book is touted as a guide to sex, love, and life in general. It is unapologetically anything goes and a down with patriarchy genital mooning. This book is a clear exampl" Read more of this review »
Jan 28, 2026 06:08PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of All the Fcking Mistakes by Gigi Engle. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — All the Fcking Mistakes by Gigi Engle <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey rated a book did not like it 511 Things Only Women Understand by Lorraine Bodger	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I don't even want to know how much this woman got paid for writing this book, or rather, for cobbling together 511 commonly known facts, done-to-death cliches, and sweeping generalizations and putting them together into something about a quarter-inch ...more
Dec 31, 2025 10:07AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of 511 Things Only Women Understand by Lorraine Bodger. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — 511 Things Only Women Understand by Lorraine Bodger <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey rated a book liked it Compromising Positions (Judith Singer, #1) by Susan Isaacs (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Historical fiction often suffers from the Anachronism Syndrome. The author does a lot of research and gets mos of it right in the book, but accidentally lets something slip into the texxt that doesn't belong in the time frame of the book. Like someon ...more
Dec 05, 2025 02:46PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Compromising Positions by Susan Isaacs. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Compromising Positions by Susan Isaacs <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Aimee Massey made a comment on Pandora ’s review of Just as Long as We're Together " Do you think an African-American reader will fall to pieces because a character in a book mentions GTWT? That's not giving them much credit, is it? The ...more "
Nov 14, 2025 02:15PM · see review

Aimee Massey rated a book liked it

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
by William J. Mann

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely.
Well researched? Check.
Interesting? Check.
Honest?
Well, now, that's complicated.
By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot o Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely.
Well researched? Check.
Interesting? Check.
Honest?
Well, now, that's complicated.
By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot of misinformation that's been accepted as fact about the murder of Elizabeth Short, much of it perpetuated by the sensation-hungry newspapers of the period.
Where the book is dishonest is in Mann's stated intention. He says that he wants to humanize Elizabeth Short herself, correct the image of her that has persisted in the public consciousness ever since she was found murdered and bisected in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on a cold morning in January of 1947. He says she was neither a prostitute nor a drifter or "lost soul" and that sexism is behind her portrayal as such, and that a man doing the exact things Short did would be thought of as intrepid and adventurous, like a Tom Sawyer.
But everything, everything, that he has unearthed about Shortcontradicts this image he wants to build of her life and personality.
We have here not a young woman defying convention and trying to make it on her own, relying on her wits and working for what she wanted.
We have instead a woman who drifts through life, wandering the streets, relying totally upon the kindness of strangers, many of whom have little more in the way of resources and money than she does.
She relies solely on her looks and superficial charm and some tall tales to get her meals bought for her, a place to sleep, new clothes, even a free henna treatment.
She is not independent nor even trying to become independent. She isn't just unemployed, she actively evades work, to the point of leaving her benefactors' home every day and wandering around, claiming she is working for a real estate company.
She charms men in particular, who all seem to feel sorry for her and allow her to string them along for weeks or months.
Let's be clear: Elizabeth Short did not deserve the fate that befell her. Nobody does. But she was not anything like what Mann is trying so hard to portray her as. And he seems oblivious to this contradiction even as he writes it all down.

He is wrong when he says that a man in Short's position would be admired for his pluckiness and resourcefulness. No, Mr. Mann. A man would be called a straight-up bum. Maybe a charming one, or a good-looking bum, but a bum all the same.
As I read on, I also began to wonder if Short wasn't actually mentally impaired in some way. She has a trunk full of her clothes shipped out to California and somehow it gets lost along the way. For months, she borrows and begs clothes from her friends, till finally a male friend thinks to ask her if she has a claim ticket for the trunk. She does, and he suggests she contact the Railway Express people and get them to either find her trunk or pay the claim. She dithers and delays, and finally he makes the call himself, and voila, the trunk is found and returned to her.
That is not the kind of behavior you'd expect from a inteligent or resourceful person. It's the behavior of someone either of low intellect, or someone so lazy and so determined to live on everyone else's charity that she's willing to give the appearance of a low intellect.
Was she a prostitute? If she was, she wasn't very successful; I think what she did was sort of a fake kind of prostitution, using her looks and the vague promise of sex to get men to pay her way, but rarely doing the actual deed. Here again, this feels like calculated laziness rather than an actual moral stance on her part.

Another, lesser issue I had with the book was that it felt padded with a lot of not-germane details. We really don't need to know the backstory of every. single. person. even peripherally connected with Short, her friends, the police and the newspaper people. There are just so very many players in this sad, ugly drama that so much detail on each bogs down the narrative.
And suspects? Hoo boy, we've got a lot of those. And here again, Mann goes into painstaking detail about them all. He says he isn't trying to conclusively solve the case, but it's clear he has his theories and his candidates of choice for "who done it." That's fine, I don't think you can really avoid that when you've spent so much time studying the subject.
But he expends the same energy analyzing the suspects as he does analyzing Short and everyone else. In my own opinion, if you discover that a possible suspect could not possibly have done the crime, because, for instance, he is verified to have been hundreds of miles away when the murder was committed, he is no longer a suspect and should not be given a lot of coverage. He may fit the profile of a sadistic murderer in all other respects, but if he could not physically be connected to the crime, then all his other traits don't matter.
I don't mean to give the impression that the book is no good. It was interesting reading and I stand behind my three-star rating.
But I have the same problem with Mann's stated aim in writing the book as I do with Hallie Rubinkam's aim in writing "the Five" about the victims of Jack the Ripper. But whereas Rubinkam has little actual info to go on and therefore thinks herself free to speculate or outright imagine details to support her own belief, Mann has plenty of facts to work with, but even as they fail to fit the picture of Elizabeth Short he's hoping to create, he continues to insist that that they do. ...more

Aimee Massey rated a book liked it

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
by William J. Mann

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely.
Well researched? Check.
Interesting? Check.
Honest?
Well, now, that's complicated.
By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot o Was this book well-written? Yes, absolutely.
Well researched? Check.
Interesting? Check.
Honest?
Well, now, that's complicated.
By honest, I don't mean factually correct. The book is factually correct, so far as I can tell. Man sets out to correct a lot of misinformation that's been accepted as fact about the murder of Elizabeth Short, much of it perpetuated by the sensation-hungry newspapers of the period.
Where the book is dishonest is in Mann's stated intention. He says that he wants to humanize Elizabeth Short herself, correct the image of her that has persisted in the public consciousness ever since she was found murdered and bisected in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on a cold morning in January of 1947. He says she was neither a prostitute nor a drifter or "lost soul" and that sexism is behind her portrayal as such, and that a man doing the exact things Short did would be thought of as intrepid and adventurous, like a Tom Sawyer.
But everything, everything, that he has unearthed about Shortcontradicts this image he wants to build of her life and personality.
We have here not a young woman defying convention and trying to make it on her own, relying on her wits and working for what she wanted.
We have instead a woman who drifts through life, wandering the streets, relying totally upon the kindness of strangers, many of whom have little more in the way of resources and money than she does.
She relies solely on her looks and superficial charm and some tall tales to get her meals bought for her, a place to sleep, new clothes, even a free henna treatment.
She is not independent nor even trying to become independent. She isn't just unemployed, she actively evades work, to the point of leaving her benefactors' home every day and wandering around, claiming she is working for a real estate company.
She charms men in particular, who all seem to feel sorry for her and allow her to string them along for weeks or months.
Let's be clear: Elizabeth Short did not deserve the fate that befell her. Nobody does. But she was not anything like what Mann is trying so hard to portray her as. And he seems oblivious to this contradiction even as he writes it all down.

He is wrong when he says that a man in Short's position would be admired for his pluckiness and resourcefulness. No, Mr. Mann. A man would be called a straight-up bum. Maybe a charming one, or a good-looking bum, but a bum all the same.
As I read on, I also began to wonder if Short wasn't actually mentally impaired in some way. She has a trunk full of her clothes shipped out to California and somehow it gets lost along the way. For months, she borrows and begs clothes from her friends, till finally a male friend thinks to ask her if she has a claim ticket for the trunk. She does, and he suggests she contact the Railway Express people and get them to either find her trunk or pay the claim. She dithers and delays, and finally he makes the call himself, and voila, the trunk is found and returned to her.
That is not the kind of behavior you'd expect from a inteligent or resourceful person. It's the behavior of someone either of low intellect, or someone so lazy and so determined to live on everyone else's charity that she's willing to give the appearance of a low intellect.
Was she a prostitute? If she was, she wasn't very successful; I think what she did was sort of a fake kind of prostitution, using her looks and the vague promise of sex to get men to pay her way, but rarely doing the actual deed. Here again, this feels like calculated laziness rather than an actual moral stance on her part.

Another, lesser issue I had with the book was that it felt padded with a lot of not-germane details. We really don't need to know the backstory of every. single. person. even peripherally connected with Short, her friends, the police and the newspaper people. There are just so very many players in this sad, ugly drama that so much detail on each bogs down the narrative.
And suspects? Hoo boy, we've got a lot of those. And here again, Mann goes into painstaking detail about them all. He says he isn't trying to conclusively solve the case, but it's clear he has his theories and his candidates of choice for "who done it." That's fine, I don't think you can really avoid that when you've spent so much time studying the subject.
But he expends the same energy analyzing the suspects as he does analyzing Short and everyone else. In my own opinion, if you discover that a possible suspect could not possibly have done the crime, because, for instance, he is verified to have been hundreds of miles away when the murder was committed, he is no longer a suspect and should not be given a lot of coverage. He may fit the profile of a sadistic murderer in all other respects, but if he could not physically be connected to the crime, then all his other traits don't matter.
I don't mean to give the impression that the book is no good. It was interesting reading and I stand behind my three-star rating.
But I have the same problem with Mann's stated aim in writing the book as I do with Hallie Rubinkam's aim in writing "the Five" about the victims of Jack the Ripper. But whereas Rubinkam has little actual info to go on and therefore thinks herself free to speculate or outright imagine details to support her own belief, Mann has plenty of facts to work with, but even as they fail to fit the picture of Elizabeth Short he's hoping to create, he continues to insist that that they do. ...more

Aimee Massey made a comment on James Hodge’s review of Stolen

" A gaiter can refer to both a type of fabric shoe/leg covering or a fabric tube-thing that you put around your neck and can pull up to protect your fac ...more "

Aimee Massey and 1 other person liked Darcia Helle's review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood:

"I’d love to give this book 5 stars just for the depth of research done by the author. But, apologies, I found it tedious. While an author needs all that research in order to tell a complete story, we readers do not need to know every single detail un" Read more of this review »

Aimee Massey made a comment on Holly’s review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood

" I have to agree with your assessment of Elizabeth Short. The author is trying just a bit too hard to rescue her image, but so far (I've only started r ...more "

Aimee Massey and 2 other people liked Holly's review of Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood:

"I was hoping this new novel would bring more conclusive and previously undivulged information that would suggest closure in this very cold, but interesting case. The author certainly spent a good deal of time doing his research, working up a picture " Read more of this review »

Aimee Massey and 6 other people liked Maria Ryan's review of All the F*cking Mistakes: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life:

"All the F*cking Mistakes is a childish and raunchy rant about all things sex. The book is touted as a guide to sex, love, and life in general. It is unapologetically anything goes and a down with patriarchy genital mooning.
This book is a clear exampl" Read more of this review »

Aimee Massey rated a book did not like it

511 Things Only Women Understand
by Lorraine Bodger

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I don't even want to know how much this woman got paid for writing this book, or rather, for cobbling together 511 commonly known facts, done-to-death cliches, and sweeping generalizations and putting them together into something about a quarter-inch ...more

Aimee Massey rated a book liked it

Compromising Positions (Judith Singer, #1)
by Susan Isaacs (Goodreads Author)

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Historical fiction often suffers from the Anachronism Syndrome. The author does a lot of research and gets mos of it right in the book, but accidentally lets something slip into the texxt that doesn't belong in the time frame of the book. Like someon Historical fiction often suffers from the Anachronism Syndrome. The author does a lot of research and gets mos of it right in the book, but accidentally lets something slip into the texxt that doesn't belong in the time frame of the book. Like someone in a book set in 1987 says "D'oh!"
You don't get this problem with books written in the past set in their own contemporary times. They come across as dated, but it's all right because they weren't when they were first written and it's not carelessness on the author's part.

"Compromising Positions" was written in 1978 and it shows. Judith Singer is a rich, mid-thirties Jewish housewife living in Long Island with her workaholic, humorless husband Bob and their two little kids. She is well-educated and is supposed to be finishing her doctoral dissertation in history, but she isn't. She is bored with her boring husband and her boring life.
So when she hears on the radio that a local periodontist named Bruce Fleckstein has been found murdered in his office, Judith becomes immediately, deeply and unhealthily interested. She saw the man professionally a grand total of once, nearly five years ago, and has no connection to him or any of his family, yet she can talk and think of nothing else, much to Bob's disgust and alarm.
The mystery itself is engaging and I enjoy Isaacs's writing style, though this being her first novel, she hadn't quite honed her technique and sometimes the dialogue was implausibly windy and witty.
And it's a clever send-up of rich suburban seventies life.
But Judith herself is not especially likable, and she's not even unlikable in a good way. She is smug and self-satisfied even as she laments her boredom and lack of outside-the-home activity. But here's the thing: nothing is actually stopping her from being something other than a bored Stepford wife. Bob, though he takes her very much for granted, has no problem with her going to back school or getting a job and is prepared to hire a housekeeper.
No, Judith's only interest is in this murder. And she won't let it alone.
Bob finds her fascination morbid and uninteresting at the same time, but when someone breaks into their house and spray-paints a warning to "M.Y.O.B." on the fridge, he tries to put his foot down, demanding that Judith stop trying to investigate the murder. Judith refuses. She was startled by the vandalism, but she gets over it quickly, and brushes Bob off when he points out that they and their children may now be in danger.
In these kind of amateur-sleuth stories, you need a suspension of disbelief if the story is going to work at all. In real life, the police would never allow an untrained, uncredentialed outsider to conduct interviews, offer theories or ride along while they execute search warrants. That's a given.
So it's not surprising in the context of the book that Judith does or tries to do all these things. Nor is it out of place that she also has a hot affair with the lead homicide detective, Nelson Sharpe.
But her character development? Something's just off. She seems both very smart, coming up with deductions that turn out to be dead-on right, and also stupid. She has empathy at times, but at others seems not to grasp the seriousness of the situation. In the very beginning, when Bob asks why she's so interested in the sordid details of Fleckstein's life (and they are very sordid indeed) and his brutal death she says that the sordidness "is what makes it fun."
We are supposed to feel sorry for Judith, I think, stifled in suburbia and having to do her husband's laundry and cook his dinner and raise the kids.
But as I said, she isn't actually trapped. And she has no problem dumping the kids off at her friends' houses or stuffing them in bed or sending them to watch TV so she can chase down leads and play Nancy Drew.
We're supposed to not like Bob for objecting to all this, and he can be a jerk; also, according to Judith, he didn't always used to be such a dull prig of a man. But as Judith continues to put herself at risk, and especially when she starts having her affair, we can't help but think "Poor Bob." I don't think he was unreasonable in his demands that Judith stop her obsession.
But if you read this just for the mystery, and the sly puncturing of the NY upper-crust, I think the book still has merit. And the author definitely did improve her craft in subsequent books. ...more

Aimee Massey made a comment on Pandora ’s review of Just as Long as We're Together

Just as Long as We're Together by Judy Blume

" Do you think an African-American reader will fall to pieces because a character in a book mentions GTWT? That's not giving them much credit, is it?
The ...more "

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