The Brief

Good-natured but unconventional barrister Henry Farmer takes on an unwinnable murder case as his life falls apart around him. Saddled with alimony and gambling debts, he is tempted into taking on too much work by his scheming senior clerk Ray Scanlon.

Henry Farmer's search for truth and justice has him risking a misconduct charge when he takes up the cause of obsessive father Costas Nicolaou who is convinced his daughter was raped and murdered at a party in the Far East. Henry's love affair with Polly is complicated by an unexpectedly friendly meeting with her MP husband, and his working relationship with beautiful solicitor Amena Laing.

Henry Farmer is persuaded to prosecute a psychopathic twelve-year-old in a gripping murder trial involving several children. He gets a taste of his own medicine by coming up against devious defense barrister Marcel Crane and soon comes to realize his own child witnesses may be less than innocent.

Events take a dramatic turn when Polly finally leaves her husband, and Henry takes on the appeal of a man involved in a bizarre sex triangle with his girlfriend and a younger man. Peter McKee was almost certainly wrongly convicted of murder but as a newly born-again Christian with a law degree, he proves to be a formidably difficult client.

Henry Farmer is defending train driver Mick Westlake in a trial for manslaughter. Mick is accused of answering his mobile phone and running a red signal, resulting in the train colliding with an oncoming goods train, killing nine commuter passengers on board.

Henry Farmer is defending Dan Otway, a young man accused of murdering his mother. Dan refuses to plead guilty, as his mother Bridget was the center of his universe, having never spent a night apart from her in all his 22 years due to his Asperger's Syndrome. But if he didn't kill his mother, who did?