Dynamite defense attorney Joseph Antonelli has never lost a case—or felt the sting of conscience for letting the guilty go free. "I can deceive anyone," he says, "and no one more quickly or more completely than myself." Now the man he most admires, the honorable Judge Rifkin, has asked him a favor: Defend a drug dealer accused of raping his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Yet in D. W. Buffa's The Defense, Antonelli's acceptance of the case sets in motion an explosive chain of corruption, betrayal, and murder that will leave no one unscathed. . . .