AUTHOR

James Sisk

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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I was born on Xmas Eve, 1944 in Cumberland, Maryland. I attended St. Peter & Paul’s Elementary School and LaSalle High School from which I graduated in 1962. My high school English teacher introduced me to fiction writing by requiring his students to develop short stories based upon photographs of people that he cut out of magazines and handed out to them. I received an award for the short story that I wrote. At the graduation ceremony, that same story encouraged me to consider a career in writing. I attended LaSalle College (now LaSalle University) in Philadelphia, PA where I majored in English. I obtained a B.A. in 1966. I attended law school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore where I received a Juris Doctorate degree (J.D.) in 1969. Moved by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I joined Volunteers in Service to America (V.I.S.T.A.) in order to work on eliminating the causes of poverty in America. V.I.S.T.A. assigned me to the University of Detroit, Center for Urban Law & Housing where I was part of the legal team that brought a lawsuit which challenged the City of Hamtramck over its use of Federal Urban Renewal Funds to remove black people from the city. After several years of litigation, the lawsuit succeeded. At this time, I met and married my first wife, Sharon Janals, with whom I had two sons, Bradley and Graham. In 1972, I accepted employment with Legal Aid of Baltimore. I worked in a neighborhood office providing free legal service to indigent clients. In 1974, I went to work with Flint Legal Services in Michigan. However, I experienced burn out and, later the same year, I relocated to East Lansing, Michigan to begin the private practice of law. Shortly thereafter, Sharon and I divorced. In 1978, I started work with the Michigan Employment Security Board of Review as a staff attorney preparing unemployment benefit appeals for the Board’s consideration and advising its members on the applicable law as well as drafting the decisions, which they reached in those cases. In 1986, I married my second wife, Marilyn Hovda. In 1992, I became an Administrative Law Judge for the Michigan Employment Security Agency. In this capacity, I conducted evidentiary hearings and issued decisions on unemployment compensation claims until my retirement in 2010. after retirement, I took up fiction writing. My first novel, a mystery entitled "The Dollar a Year Man," involves the murder of a female lobbyist who worked for a Washington, D.C. firm fighting proposed legislation that would create a single-payer health insurance system in the U.S.A. The murder occurs in a small Michigan resort town whose Chief of Police fears that his department may not be up to the task of handling the investigation of such a serious crime. So he coaxes his brother, a retired Detroit homicide detective, to lead the investigation. Very soon, the detective, Mitch Paulson, finds himself enmeshed in the most complex case of his career with three possible suspects, a sitting U.S. Senator, a professional hit man, and a homeless squatter.
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