How we make it work: The Bookshop Detectives authors Gareth and Louise Ward on life and love

As part of the Herald’s series, “How we make it work”, Gareth and Louise explain how Mother Nature played a hand in their engagement and the joy they find in writing together.

When we first met at police training college, Louise was quite a feisty character and had a bit of a reputation as the class “rottweiler”.

In one of our very first training exercises, we were paired and had to use a police radio for role play. She was using the radio slightly wrong and having trouble, and I suggested that if you pressed the button and waited a little bit before speaking, people would be able to hear the start of your message.

She absolutely bit my head off, and that was my first impression of my darling wife.

It was probably that point I knew there might be something there. I remember thinking, “Ooh, there’s a challenge”, and now here we are.

Louise has always been intelligent, thoughtful and full of character, and we just hit it off. I’m sure alcohol helped things along at some point, but mostly we just had fun together.

She moved into my flat fairly early on and was driving huge distances from Nottingham to Northamptonshire, where I lived, on her days off work so we could be together.

I think I just realised that she was the person for me. It’s one of those things you can’t quite describe, but you just get that feeling, that I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.

There have been times when Louise was my absolute rock, and I wouldn’t have got through things without her. We’ve always looked after each other and focused on whoever needs the most help at that moment.

One of the things I love most about Louise is her kindness - spending more than 30 years with her has genuinely made me a better person. She’s knocked the rough corners off me, and her instinct is always to care and protect.

We’ll be driving somewhere, and she’ll spot a dog by the roadside and immediately start worrying about where its owner is. She notices things in others, and in animals that other people miss.

She’s the same as a mother and always puts our two, now adult, children first, whether that meant playing with them, reading to them, or just being there. She always gave them her time, her attention and her empathy, and I think that kindness has passed down to both of them. She really is the best mum you could ask for.

She’s also much better at saying sorry than I am. I will probably go off and have a grump for a day or so, whereas she likes to sort things out immediately. We’ve got two very distinct ways of dealing with things. But if you love someone, you just work it out.

These days, one of the greatest joys in our relationship is writing together. We sit down and brainstorm and come up with these ideas, and then we work it through. So it’s very collaborative.

It’s been the most fun I’ve had writing because it’s such a joy to write with Louise, and we’ve never argued about it at all. We left our egos at the door and decided the only thing that mattered was for the book to be the very best that it could be.

I’m excited to see where the writing takes us next. We have challenges ahead, including moving one of our bookshops, but that’s what we’ve always done: tackle the next adventure.

The lightning cracked just as he proposed. It was one of those moments that felt almost scripted.

Gareth had transformed the long, narrow garden of his terraced house in Banbury, England into a Japanese garden and set up a birthday dinner for me outside. We dressed up, made a proper occasion of it, and after tiramisu for dessert, he went down on one knee.

At the same time, a thunderstorm rolled in; the lightning flashed across the sky at exactly the right moment. It was all wonderfully dramatic. What could I say but yes?

Our story began at police training college in Brighton in 1993. Training college felt a bit like starting university: new people, new friendships and little groups forming almost immediately. Gareth arrived with his friend Darren, and he played a starring role in our love story.

Darren and I quickly became good friends, and he was the one who spotted the chemistry before either of us really acknowledged it.

There was a party somewhere and after a few drinks, Darren more or less nudged us together. From there, it just felt easy - being together felt natural.

I moved into Gareth’s house and within about a year of meeting, we were married. We had a traditional white wedding in Long Eaton, where I was born and raised, largely because my mum wanted me to have the church wedding she never had herself.

I always joke that it was really Mum’s wedding. She organised the whole thing and made it gloriously fluffy, frilly and lovely.

The early years of our marriage were intense as we were living apart for work, with me in Nottingham and Gareth in Northamptonshire, only seeing each other on rest days.

Then our daughter Alex arrived and not long afterwards, Gareth’s mum became seriously ill and died. Within a few months my grandfather died, and my dad was in hospital. We had this tiny baby and an extraordinary amount of grief and upheaval all at once. Alex, now nearly 30, was the joy that kept us going through it.

Since then we’ve emigrated to New Zealand, raised two wonderful children, opened bookshops and started writing books together.

We both have a slightly childish sense of humour and can usually cheer each other up by being daft. He’s incredibly kind and the people he loves, he loves for life and would do anything for, but he chooses them carefully.

We’re now in what I call a state of middle-aged flux - the children have flown the nest, we’re dreaming up new writing projects together and occasionally wondering whether we should downsize.

But we always come back to the same conclusion: we love our life, we love where we are - even if the house falls to bits around us.

- Murder and Mojitos is out now