IN her Sheldon & Splash series of adventures, T&A reporter Jenny Loweth combines her love of horses with her knowledge of crime, picked up from cases she has covered at Bradford Crown Court for nearly 20 years.

The fifth book in the series is The Secret of Red Horse Cove, in which an old treasure map sends Sheldon on an exciting adventure to the Yorkshire coast. It’s the latest book featuring Jenny’s Bradford born character Sheldon and his horse.

Aimed at teenagers and “anyone who enjoys a good easy-to-read story”, the Sheldon & Splash books are compelling adventures, with evocative backdrops spanning West and North Yorkshire.

Sheldon Ellwood has returned to his home city of Bradford twice during his adventures so far. In Faster than Witches, he walks the streets in a desperate search for his stolen horse, passing the illuminated bridge near Forster Square Station and the imposing Midland Hotel: “The huge Victorian building was lit by great chandeliers visible through the tall windows. Like the railway bridge, the hotel was built on a grand scale, testament to the city’s prosperous industrial past. Sheldon remembered his Grandad telling him that fleets of Rolls-Royces used to be lined up outside.”

The first Sheldon book, Broken Flight, was written in 2019. Since then, four more have followed, in which the teenager faces gun runners and drug dealers and journeys with his girlfriend Alice to the Devil’s Arrows, three ancient standing stones at Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire, on a quest to find a mysterious horse.

Jenny’s fourth book in the series, The Cat & the Cottager’s Bones, was “a sinister tale of murder and bloodshed”.

The Secret of Red Horse Cove is more of a traditional adventure story, in which Sheldon and Alice set off to the east coast near Filey to find the treasure that Alice’s pirate ancestor, Ezekial Farrell, stole in a shipwreck and hid in a cave. But once they reach the coast they are met with suspicion and hostility from the locals, and soon run into danger.

A young man galloping his pony on the beach lends intrigue and Sheldon’s guardian angel, a ghost witch in the form of a black cat, is forced to get her whiskers wet to come to his rescue.

It’s a delightful book - an old-fashioned yarn about a search for treasure that can be enjoyed whether you’re a horse person or not.

Jenny writes with great warmth and creates vibrant, believable characters. I came to it without having read the previous books in the series, but soon felt like I knew the characters well. And having read this adventure, I now want to discover the others.

Jenny says she writes for the love of it. “I don’t sell any books, except to a handful of family and friends, because I am an unknown self-published author. I have read that someone like me would have to spend at least 80per cent of their time marketing them instead of writing them. I don’t want to do that. It’s the writing I love,” she says.

“I was also told that most authors have a one in 1,000 chance of being accepted by an agent. I’m just not mentally resilient enough to take that much rejection. The people that read my Sheldon books really enjoy them. That has to be enough,” adds Jenny.

The striking cover illustrations of the Sheldon & Splash adventures are by local artist Danielle Allen. “I do a terrible drawing, labelled with what things are supposed to be, and Dani works a miracle,” says Jenny. “The ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures are a great source of amusement because I really cannot draw at all.”

Jenny is also the author of Forking Off, a memoir of her time working as a stable hand in the Yorkshire Dales, and The Festive Phantom, a collection of light-hearted stories about a horse detective solving mysteries at his livery yard.

l The Secret of Red Horse Cove is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.