Lara Stone Books in Order

The Lara Stone books are contemporary mysteries built around an investigative journalist who cannot resist a good story, even when it might kill her. Across The Yacht Party, The Last Supper, The Ivy and The Malibu House, Lara exposes the secrets of the ultra‑rich in settings that range from Monte Carlo marinas to snowy Swedish forests and the sun‑bleached cliffs of Malibu.

Lara herself is part of the media establishment and slightly outside it. She writes long‑form investigations for her family’s London newspaper, rides a motorbike and lives on a Chelsea houseboat with her cat, more comfortable chasing leads than attending society lunches. That combination of connections and independence lets her move easily between oligarchs’ decks, university quads and back‑street cafés where whistle‑blowers talk.

In The Yacht Party, Lara has just been pushed onto sabbatical after a costly libel case, but time out of the newsroom does not last. When a fellow reporter and old friend dies in what looks like suicide, Lara follows her last story, uncovering rumours of a billionaire’s floating parties, missing women and a network of influence that stretches across Europe. The mystery takes her from London to the south of France and the Scottish Highlands, testing who she can trust inside her own industry.

The Last Supper narrows the focus to a classic closed‑circle setup. Lara secures a booking at Kluven, a remote, farm‑to‑table restaurant in Sweden that food obsessives would kill to visit. Over one wintery weekend the guests share a single table, the chef ends up with a knife in his chest, and a snowstorm cuts them off from help. Lara’s job becomes working out which of the twelve strangers has turned murderer before she is next.

In The Ivy she crosses the Atlantic to Benedon College, an Ivy‑clad New England university where she has been invited to teach a course on investigative reporting. The campus is still reeling from the unexplained death of a student and the apparent suicide of a professor linked to her. Beneath the gowns and traditions Lara finds entitlement, academic politics and a scandal that those in charge are desperate to keep quiet.

The Malibu House sends Lara to California with the promise of sun and downtime in a rented beach house. The property, however, is infamous as the scene of singer Verity Jones’s death decades earlier after one of her legendary parties. Old friends from the Laurel Canyon music scene have since reinvented themselves as power players, and as Lara digs she discovers that the story everyone told about that night might have been a cover.

Each Lara Stone book works as a stand‑alone mystery with its own crime, suspects and resolution, but there is a gentle through‑line in Lara’s personal life and career. Expect glamorous locations, slow unravelling puzzles and a heroine who is as interested in why people lie as in proving who swung the knife. You can safely start with whichever premise appeals most, though beginning with The Yacht Party lets you watch Lara’s world expand with each case.