Los Angeles courts, lands the high-profile double murder case of Detective Dale Pearson. Initially attributed to a botched burglary, the murders of actress Chloe Monahan and her roommate Paige Avner are soon blamed on the veteran police officer, who had been dating Chloe and was overheard fighting with her on the night of her death. Unsure of his guilt or innocence, Samantha and her team—paralegal Michelle Fusco and hacker/investigator/felon Alex Medrano—pull out all the stops in their defense of Pearson. Publication Blood Defense was released on May 1, 2016 by Thomas & Mercer. While her Rachel Knight series was published by "traditional publisher" Mulholland Books, Thomas & Mercer is an imprint of Amazon Publishing. Of the change, Clark said: Clark's contract is for two books a year, which she calls a "tough" pace as a writer but also "a brilliant marketing choice". She explained: Reception Calling Clark's new series "promising", Publishers Weekly wrote that "Clark sprinkles jaw-dropping surprises throughout and impressively pulls off a shocker that lesser writers can only envy." Shawna Seed of The Dallas Morning News described the "ethically flexible" Samantha as believably flawed, praising the novel's ending and Clark's portrayal of "the symbiotic relationship between the L.A. criminal justice system and the media". Jonathan Elderfield wrote for Associated Press that Clark "has the most fun when she's showing readers the world of celebrity trials, from the media circus, the courthouse crowds, the crazies and the police to the inner workings of the trial itself". Television adaptation In April 2016, Mandeville TV approached Clark about producing Blood Defense as a legal procedural TV series, and the project was acquired by ABC Studios "in a competitive situation". Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain from the ABC/Mandeville production The Family were brought in to co-write the adaptation with Clark. NBC signed a put pilot commitment for the Blood Defense series in August 2016. Sequels A sequel, Moral Defense, was released on November 8, 2016. Clark began developing it in September 2015, and the novel was already written when Blood Defense was released in May 2016. In Moral Defense, Samantha defends a 15-year-old girl accused of brutally murdering her adoptive family. Clark said that though Samantha is dealing with a new crime, "the issues that are hatched in Blood Defense are definitely going to come back to haunt her". The third Samantha Brinkman novel, Snap Judgment, was published on August 29, 2017.