ROBERT B. PARKER'S BROKEN TRUST

Lupica, having already continued the sagas of Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone, takes the helm for the latest adventure of Parker’s signature sleuth, with mixed results.

“Laura Crain might have been the first dead client I ever had,” Boston shamus Spenser reflects after his psychologist lover Susan Silverman’s friend is found strangled in a Brookline park shortly after hiring him to find out what’s bugging her husband. Whatever it is must be big, because scientist Andrew Crain’s mastery of a process to produce synthetic lithium has made him the sixth-wealthiest man in the U.S., and when do billionaires ever have bad days? Spenser tries to question entrepreneur Ethan Lowe, Crain’s best friend and partner in Lith, Inc.; Crain’s executive assistant, Claire Megill; and even Crain himself. But they’re a closemouthed bunch, and Crain actually runs out of a restaurant dinner he and Laura are having with Spenser and Susan. That’s the last Spenser sees of Laura, and Crain seriously threatens his own company (which Lowe is hoping to steer into a lucrative takeover by a Canadian automaker) by disappearing, returning just in time to give a highly uninformative press conference and then firing Spenser, whom he’d never hired. Feeling honor-bound to get to the bottom of the mystery that so exercised his client, Spenser keeps on the case without pay, pausing only for repeated coyly described bouts of sex with Susan, and ends up uncovering enough skullduggery for two installments of this beloved franchise. This time, though, Lupica’s addiction to multiplying subplots not only bulks up a tale that could have been slenderer but turns the big reveal into an endless series of confrontations with different malefactors to whom Spenser dispenses condign justice.

Far too much of a good thing.