Award-winning Hawke’s Bay novelists Gareth and Louise Ward - together in everything they do

Hawke's Bay bookshop owners Louise and Gareth Ward have won a national award for their latest novel.

Perhaps the next book will include a yarn about cancelled flights.

Watch this space for the next effort from best-selling and award-winning Hawke’s Bay authors and bookstore owners Gareth and Louise Ward.

At the Aotearoa Book Industry Awards in Auckland on Saturday, the former England police officers, who operate their Wardini Bookstores in Havelock North and Napier, won the Booksellers Choice Adult Award, for their book The Bookshop Detectives 1: Dead Girl Gone.

It’s the first in what is well on the way to becoming a three-book series.

But any chances of getting home on Sunday to celebrate with friends and SPCA rescue pooch Stevie, already a recognisable character morphed in the co-authoring career they’ve established Downunder, were deferred because of the cancellation of the flight.

On Monday afternoon, they said, together, in keeping with the same-page basis of seemingly everything they do: “We’ve only just got home this morning.”

Home - with Bookshop Detectives: #2 Tea and Cake and Death already on the stands - to prepare #3 for publishing by next April, with what Louise describes as the “nice piece of paper” that symbolises the award.

One might think it would also portend acceleration past best-seller ranks to those actually making some coin in the novel-writing game.

Fact is that, while they understand Dead Girl Gone was the No 1 best-seller for a New Zealand novel last year, they say it’s something more they enjoy doing than expecting to make a fortune.

The couple’s fascination with New Zealand started with visits by Louise to her brother, who had emigrated to Hawke’s Bay.

They arrived in Havelock North in 2007, finding over the years there were others of the literary enthused who’d moved to Hawke’s Bay for similar reasons. Louise reels off a string of award winners, including Charity Norman, whose seventh book, Remember Me, published in 2022, was acclaimed the best novel at the Ngaio Marsh Awards last November.

They opened the first Wardini Bookstore in Havelock North in 2013, and a second in Napier in 2017, and started writing.

The couple went to Auckland at the weekend knowing they were in with a chance, having been “short-listed” for what was one of 15 categories, in which publisher Penguin also benefited from the book, with the publicity and marketing.

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 52 years of journalism experience, 42 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.