Guest Post: Amanda Wills and Book 8 of the Riverdale Pony Series

I am delighted to welcome to my blog the best-selling pony book author Amanda Wills as part of her mini blog tour to launch her 8th book in the Riverdale Pony series!  
Over to you, Amanda......

Few stories have a stronger association with Dartmoor than the famous Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The bleak and remote moorland is the perfect setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale of an ancient curse and a monstrous hound.

And it was this tale of greed and duplicity that inspired my latest book and the eighth in the Riverdale Pony Stories, The Mysteryof Riverdale Tor.

image credit Amanda Wills

My heroine, 14-year-old Poppy McKeever, lives on Dartmoor with her beloved Connemara pony Cloud.

Solving mysteries and having adventures is Poppy’s speciality. So, it was only a matter of time before she was faced with the kind of conundrum that would have had even the great Sherlock Holmes scratching his chin.

Writing The Mystery of Riverdale Tor was the perfect excuse to re-read The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The perfect marriage of a detective story and a gothic tale, the book had me gripped from the first page to the eagerly-anticipated denouement.

There are no supernatural hounds in my book, nor ancient family curses. There are no escaped convicts and no gloomy Baskerville Hall.

But there is a killer dog on the loose, and no-one knows where it’s come from or who it belongs to.

When the sheep on her best friend Scarlett’s farm are attacked, Poppy makes it her mission to track down the dog that has been terrorising the moor.

She must turn detective if she is to discover who owns the menacing hound before it kills again.

Of course, like any good whodunnit, there are plenty of dead ends and red herrings along the way and Poppy knows she must sift the truth from the lies if she is to find the killer dog and its nefarious owner.

There is also the small matter of a TREC competition to train for with her friends.

What Sherlock Holmes would make of Poppy’s sleuthing skills, who knows?

But if readers enjoy the book half as much as I enjoyed writing it, then I will be a very happy author!

Amanda Wills is the author of the Amazon bestselling Riverdale Pony Stories. The eighth book in the series, The Mystery of Riverdale Tor, is out now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mystery-Riverdale-Pony-Stories-Book-ebook/dp/B07PGBX7NH/

You can visit Amanda’s website here: https://www.amandawills.co.uk/, find her on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/riverdaleseries/ or follow her on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/amandawillsauthor/?hl=en