This is the fourth mystery written by former Journal political reporter Mark Arsenault, and it is by far his best. The level of writing is crisper, his details sharper and more revealing, and his plot so craftily spun that you won’t know who did what to whom until virtually the last pages of the book.

It starts with a bang, or in this case a car crash. A car’s been hijacked. The bad guy with the gun has kidnapped Stu Tracy, who winds up in the hospital for most of the book. The bad guy’s killed, one Adam Rackers, a petty thief who with his crony Scratch knows how to unload hot goods on the Internet. “We were such a great team, man,” Scratch explains. “We could steal anything. Adam once told me, ‘Together, we could loot the moon.’ ” But then we find out that Rackers has killed the wealthy and beloved Judge Gil Harmony, shot him through the eye in fact.

Martin Smothers, a scruffy, big-hearted lawyer, “the patron saint of hopeless causes,” confides to the sometime-investigator and all-night-obituary journalist, Billy Povich, that it’s odd that a lowlife like Rackers would kill a judge. Someone must have paid him to do it. And thus the plot begins to hum and spin as Povich tries to track down possible suspects.

One night in a restaurant, the mobster, David “Rhubarb” Glanz, threatened Harmony publicly. Harmony’s wife, June, has discovered the possibility of her husband’s leading a double life. When Harmony’s will is revealed on video tape, his brother Lincoln, also a judge but a better drunk, inherits only his brother’s law books. There’s also feisty Kit Bass, the good judge’s law clerk, who manages to get caught by Glanz’s goons.

Arsenault revs up his tale with live burials, knife attacks, a strange tattoo, a loupe on line, and a guy on the lam, convinced that someone is out to kill him. He’s right. Into this wanders the steadfast Billy Povich, determined to figure out exactly what’s going on even if it means meeting a dangerous fellow in a Cranston cemetery after hours.

Arsenault enrichs his mystery with the Povich family. The three of them live above a funeral parlor not far from the Cranston armory. His addition of “WaterFire” and the rotunda of the State House add to the local color of his Rhode Island yarn. But it’s the Poviches we remember.

William, Senior, who deserted his family years ago, is now on dialysis and eager to die. Billy’s 8-year-old son Bo lives with the two of them and carries an Albert Einstein doll around with him, still affected by his mother’s recent death, Billy’s divorced wife. The three males manage to scrape through each day with their own spiritual and physical burdens, and Arsenault deepens our knowledge and emotional attachment to them as the mystery unfolds.

“Loot the Moon” charges ahead, uncovering the darker depths of life in Rhode Island and grounding the tale in real-life issues and events. It positively zips along, and when I came to the end, I was totally caught off guard. It all fit, it works like an elegant jigsaw puzzle, and I never saw it coming.

LOOT THE MOON,

by Mark Arsenault.

Minotaur Books. 276 pages. $24.99.

samcoale@cox.net