The Protest by Rob Rinder

The Protest is the third Adam Green novel by Rob Rinder, which was published in 2026. The Adam Green books are fun, easy to read murder mysteries, with the focus on the young barrister, Adam Green, rather than the usual detectives. To me, they’re in a similar vein to the Rev Richard Coles books or the Tom Hindle books (although his are all standalone novels).

Rob Rinder has found a winning formula and he’s stuck with it with The Protest. In every one of his books, someone well known dies publicly and suddenly. It is always seemingly obvious who the murderer is. Adam then has to defend the suspect in court.

In The Protest, the victim is a world famous artist, Max Bruce. Max, his family and the great and the good of the art world are all at an event at The Royal Academy to celebrate his life’s work. As Max addresses the crowd, a protestor throws blue paint in his face. Within minutes, he is dead – the paint was laced with cyanide.

All evidence points to the protestor as the murderer, so the police investigation is pretty inadequate. Adam is given the near impossible task of defending the protestor and sowing the seeds of doubt in the minds of a jury. I impressed myself by working out both the murderer and the motive!

Alongside the main case, Adam has first experience of a court martial, with the moving case of a young boy dying at the end of a war and the soldier accused of killing him.

The Protest has the usual humour. There’s digs at some of the shoddy and biased reporting by British news media and at Max’s son, the nepo baby, who certainly bears a resemblance to at least one nepo baby we hear about rather a lot through social media and the gossip columns.

If you’re looking for a fun read, which isn’t too challenging, I would recommend The Protest. It’s not necessary to read The Trial and The Suspect beforehand, but you would probably enjoy those too!