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By Tanya Carter

Shelf Life

Work in Progress

A brutal attack on a local grocery store owner in the fictional town of Edison, Pennsylvania, sends shock waves through the community and tests the bonds that hold the town together. Long-held secrets are exposed, testing the character of many of the town’s residents, including the new Chief of Police, Jake Keenan; Lucas Harmon, a veteran who has moved back home to find some elusive peace; Jackson Wagner, a neurodivergent teenager; and Piper Jones, a young woman who is trying to keep her family organic farm alive while shelving her dream of a career in music. Through shifting points of view, the novel presents a town in flux that nevertheless defends its essential humanity against the mayhem that threatens it.

Anne Lamott suggests that the very best novels remind us of the ways in which we take care of one another.Tanya Carter’s novel, “Shelf Life,” does exactly this, and then some.

Josh Rolnick

Lecturer, MA in Writing Program, Johns Hopkins University

Literary Suspense Novelist

Tanya Carter

Tanya Carter grew up in the town of Cobourg on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. She now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her family. Tanya earned her MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins, where she received the Outstanding Graduate Award. For fun, she enjoys playing the ukulele and singing alto while her daughter sings soprano. Occasionally she knits socks. She is a member of the Sisters in Crime professional association and writes suspense. Shelf Life is her first novel.

Outstanding Graduate Award
This student exemplifies the qualities we look for in our finest students…She held herself to rigorous standards and produced a superior novel draft by the time she completed the program.
Karen Houppert

Director, MA in Writing Program, Johns Hopkins University

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“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

― Annie Proulx

Coming Soon!

Upcoming Project

Half Life

Suspense

It is fall in Edison, the season when the leaf peepers come to town and the Scout troops are hiking in the woods. Police Chief Jake Keenan is called to a grisly scene–an unidentified vagrant with his chest cavity torn open has been left in a shallow grave. Who is he, and who is leaving mutilated bodies in the Westmoreland County countryside?

My Writing Blog

Musings

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by | Last updated Dec 8, 2025

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by | Last updated Dec 4, 2025

We spent Thanksgiving week in Cook Forest State Park. I took my laptop but did exactly no writing while I was there. I did a lot of knitting though, which was relaxing. We had the first real snowfall of the season while we were there as well. The woods beside the...

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