A poisoned bath salt and a client nobody wants to defend

When wellness entrepreneur and former MP Adrian Wells dies in front of a crowd of influencers, the cause turns out to be monkshood, an old and lethal poison dissolved into the very bath salts he was publicly promoting. The death is spectacular, the press is immediate, and the prime suspect is Jules, his personal assistant, a woman with a very public reputation for malice from a reality TV appearance that the internet has never let her forget.

Barrister Adam Green is assigned her defence. It is not the brief he would have chosen. Jules is difficult, apparently guilty by every metric a jury would care about, and the list of people who might have wanted Adrian Wells dead grows longer the deeper Adam digs. There was the anti-pharma legislation Wells championed as an MP, the patients who abandoned conventional cancer treatment for his herbal remedies, and the quiet devastation that followed. The case has more than one layer.

The third novel in Rob Rinder's Adam Green series brings the barrister back to a courtroom where the law and the truth are rarely the same thing. Rinder, a practising barrister himself, keeps the procedural detail grounded without letting it slow the story down. What drives it is Adam's own discomfort with the job: the daily work of standing up for people he is not sure deserve it, and the nagging question of what that work says about him.

Audiobook review ★★★★★

A legal thriller that doesn't ask you to like the client

I came to this one having read The Trial, the first Adam Green novel, so I had a sense of what Rinder does well. What surprised me about The Defence is how much further he pushes the moral discomfort this time. Jules is not written to be sympathetic. She's abrasive, she lies by omission, and the audiobook doesn't smooth that out.

The poisoning setup is clever without being showy. Adrian Wells is the kind of figure who accumulates enemies quietly, and the novel takes its time unpacking exactly how many people he damaged, from the constituents he persuaded to abandon NHS cancer treatment in favour of his own herbal products, to the colleagues he manoeuvred past on his way up. By the time Adam has worked through the full picture, the list of plausible suspects is genuinely long, and Rinder earns that complexity because each motive is rooted in something real.

What I kept coming back to was Adam himself. He is not a confident hero. He questions whether he is any good at the job, whether defending the indefensible makes him complicit in something, and whether the courtroom is where he actually belongs. That ongoing uncertainty gives the book a texture that most legal thrillers skip entirely. There is also a secondary cast worth mentioning: the KC Ursula Elder is memorable, and the fractious father and son pairing gives the novel some of its sharpest comedy.

The ending does not cheat. It arrives at a conclusion that feels earned rather than convenient, which is harder to pull off in this genre than it looks.

Josh Dylan narrates, and he is the right choice. He has been the voice of Adam Green since the first book, and by now the character fits him. He handles the courtroom sequences with pace and keeps the quieter, more internal chapters from losing tension. At 11 hours and 38 minutes, the audiobook moves. I finished it over two days without feeling the length.

Legal thriller Adam Green series Courtroom drama Josh Dylan narration Rob Rinder

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Audiobook cover: The Defence by Rob Rinder

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The Defence by Rob Rinder is the third novel in the Adam Green series, published by Penguin on June 18, 2026. It centres on a public poisoning at a wellness product launch, with Adam taking on the defence of Jules, the dead man's assistant and the obvious suspect. The case pulls him through the history of a figure who caused real harm behind a polished public image, and the novel doesn't let that moral weight sit quietly in the background.

Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, and hear Josh Dylan narrate all 11 hours and 38 minutes of the audiobook. Dylan has been the voice of Adam Green across the series, and his delivery brings both the courtroom tension and Adam's quieter moments of doubt to life in a way that reads as fully inhabited rather than performed.

The audiobook remains yours forever, even after the trial ends. The free trial also opens access to thousands of other titles, with no long-term commitment required. Start listening now.