Lace Books in Order

Lace begins with one of the great opening questions in commercial fiction. A famous young film star, Lili, brings together four women who once knew each other well and asks the question that has haunted her life: which one is her mother?

From there the story moves backward and forward between youth and adulthood. The older women, Judy, Pagan, Maxine, and Kate, first met at a Swiss finishing school, where desire, privilege, and fear got tangled up with a secret none of them has really escaped. By the time Lili tracks them down, each woman has built a very different adult life, and Conran uses those separate paths to show how class, money, work, marriage, and reputation shape women's choices.

The mystery is the hook, but it is not the only thing going on.

What really carries the series is the mix of old friendship and old resentment. These women know too much about one another. They have shared youth, shame, ambition, and compromise, and Lili's search forces all of that back into the open. The emotional pull comes from watching people who have become polished adults discover that the past still has a very long reach.

Setting matters here. The books move through Swiss school corridors, New York hotels, London offices, Paris apartments, and other glossy spaces where power looks elegant on the surface and ruthless underneath. This is very much a big 1980s-style saga, full of fashion, money, sex, travel, and career battles, but the heart of it is still identity: who belongs to whom, who gets to tell the story, and what women owe each other after years of silence.

Lace II picks up after the first novel's central secret has been dragged into the light. Instead of stopping at the big reveal, Conran asks what happens next. Lili is still searching, the older women still have unfinished business, and family history keeps creating fresh trouble. The sequel shifts the focus from discovery to fallout, which gives the series a broader family-saga feel rather than making it a one-mystery setup.

Nobody in these books gets to stay safely buried in the past.

If you're wondering about tone, think glossy drama with real bite. The series has the scale and sweep people often want from a bonkbuster, but it is also very interested in money, work, status, and the practical ways women make lives for themselves. The books were adapted into a successful US miniseries in 1984, followed by Lace II in 1985, which helped fix Lili's opening question in popular culture. If you want secrets, reinvention, and women fighting for space in rich, unforgiving worlds, this is a strong place to start.