Body in the Brine

by Alia Sayegh PhD

Overview

It is 1974 and Kelly Ross is a young teacher struggling to inspire her high school students in spite of a deteriorating building, pupil antics and the inept leadership of Principal Alec Smythe. She finds a note marked "death" in her mailbox the same day that an exceptionally bright former student, Michael Kalisto, washes up dead on the beach. Setting out to discover how he died, Kelly stumbles upon a drug and pedophilia ring involving people she knows and trusts. What follows is a fast-paced series of events, including a bomb threat, a love affair, and yet another death, before the mystery is finally solved. Set in the early days of the gambling industry in Atlantic City, this is a story of individual lives figuratively and literally swept into a turbulent sea, sweeping the reader along with them until the very last page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781470163877
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	07/10/2012
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, Alia Sayegh received her PhD in Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, her MS in Education from Penn in 1965 and her BA degree in 1950 from New York University.

Upon graduating from NYU, she traveled abroad and worked four years in an Israeli kibbutz doing various jobs including training immigrant youth from Morocco. She returned to the United States and worked in the Atlantic City School District for thirty-four years, first as French teacher, then as Supervisor of Fine and Industrial Arts and finally as District Supervisor of Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language.

During her teaching career she secured grants over a ten year period from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts to bring artists-in-residence to the high school. She also developed a course in the Humanities through a grant from the National Humanities Faculty, lectured at curriculum conventions and put together an education foundation in Atlantic City to initiate collaboration among industries, college professors and high school teachers for the purpose of enrichment.

She received several honors, among them a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend a month long inter-professional seminar in 1981 on Taste and Popular Culture at the University of Chicago. That year she was selected as a contributor at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury College, Vermont. She was also selected as a Master Teacher by the National Humanities Faculty and invited to spend a month at the University of Santa Cruz to consider issues in the humanities with fifty of her peers through the United States.

Besides writing articles in her field of education, she is the author of a novel called "Alex in the Promised Land," published by Gefen Books in 1995, and co-author of a guide to aging called "Escape from the Green Recliner," recently published and now available on amazon.com.
Alia still lives at the Jersey shore, enjoying her writing, her walks along the beach, and visits from her three children and four grandchildren.