When I saw Net Galley had the latest Rob Rinder book in the Adam Green series, I was delighted to be granted an advance review copy. I then realised I’d missed the second book in the series, The Suspect, so had to read that first! Here’s the blurb for book three:

“A world-famous artist. A fatal brush with death.
At a star-studded opening night for the Royal Academy’s celebration of renowned artist Max Bruce, someone is hiding a dark secret.
As the night reaches its climax and Max addresses his admirers, the occasion takes a shocking turn when a protester runs from the crowd and sprays the artist with blue paint.
Max collapses and it soon turns out that the paint was laced with cyanide. Someone has been plotting to kill him.
All evidence points to the protestor – and newly qualified barrister Adam Green is assigned the impossible task of their defence.
But could there be others who wanted Max dead?”

The book starts exactly as per the blurb – and again Rob has characters which you immediately recognise from popular culture (a nepo-son with a hot sauce brand remind you of anyone?!) The book also follows the skeleton of the previous books with Adam working on a high profile case, interweaved with another case – and I quite enjoyed the light and shade, or shade and shadier, that this brought to the book.

I felt that this time Adam’s Mum didn’t feature quite as much – which was a shame, as I love her!! But she’s always there in the back ground – and her phonecalls are classic.

This book would stand alone – but knowing the back story of all of the characters definitely adds to it – and it’s interesting to see how they all develop. It also emphasises just how overworked young barristers are.

There are lots of twists and turns in the book as the story progresses – some of which I have to confess guessing in advance (but that does make me feel smug and clever, so isn’t necessarily a bad thing!)

My one niggle is there were quite a few grammatical errors and odd inconsistencies – for example Adam quotes a text from his Mum and says why would she use 1 emoji when she could use 3 or 4 – but in the text he quoted, she’d only used 2! I suspect that this may be because I read an early proof copy – and some anal editor (my dream job!) will have picked these up before the book is actually published! And it didn’t detract from a great book.

The Protest was out a few days ago, so if you like the sound of it – or would like to reconnect with Adam Green from the previous books – then you can buy it right now!

Many thanks to the publisher and Net Galley for my advance review copy.