Confidential Books in Order

The Confidential series collects two glamorous legal‑and‑media thrillers, Private Lives and Perfect Strangers. The link between them is not shared characters but a shared world: lawyers, publicists and journalists who are paid to manage other people’s scandals, only to find themselves caught at the centre of a crisis.

In Private Lives we meet Anna Kennedy, a young associate at a top London media‑law firm. Her job is to protect actors, rock stars and reality‑show contestants from damaging headlines, drafting injunctions and late‑night emails to keep stories out of the papers. When she fails to stop a story about heart‑throb actor Sam Charles, Anna’s professional setback quickly becomes personal. The fallout leads her to a dead party girl, a privileged clique and a cover‑up so serious that people are willing to kill to keep it buried.

Anna’s journey takes readers from West End red‑carpet premieres to private members’ clubs, country estates and back rooms where deals are really done. Perry uses her magazine background to fill the pages with details of how stories are spun and suppressed, while asking what happens to the ordinary staffers who are expected to clean up the mess.

Perfect Strangers steps away from the law firm into the life of Sophie Ellis, a broke young woman offered the chance to house‑sit a glossy Knightsbridge townhouse. It feels like pure luck: free accommodation, glamorous neighbours, and a whirlwind romance with visiting American businessman Nick Cooper. When Nick is found dead and Sophie is suddenly at the top of the suspect list, she discovers that the townhouse owner’s world of private jets and couture disguises a criminal conspiracy that spans London, New York and the Côte d’Azur.

Both novels mix romance and high living with the mechanics of investigation. Rather than professional detectives, it is women on the edge of powerful circles who pull at loose threads and uncover what rich, dangerous people would rather keep hidden. The “confidential” of the title refers as much to legal letters and non‑disclosure agreements as to whispered secrets in hotel bars.

You can read either book first without missing anything, but taken together they give a rounded picture of Perry’s fascination with the media machine: the way image is curated, the pressure on those who work behind the scenes, and the thin line between a glamorous job and a very dangerous one.