Review: Huge Disappointment
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2014
***SPOILERS INCLUDED***I read the first book in the Intention series as part of a collection of books and was so intrigued that I purchased Grave Intention immediately after finishing with the first.The first part of Grave Intention was interesting and I was happily reading along anticipating yet another great story.  I especially loved the British words and phrases used by the author.Sadly though, about halfway through the book it all just changed.  I started wondering whom, exactly, I should be feeling sorry for.  It certainly wasn't Charles Dugan, whom Ellen Brazil has been hired to find.  Mr. Dugan has lost his wife and daughter in a home fire and has also been beaten severely by the goons of a loan shark/poker game 'entrepreneur'.  As the story progresses though, Dugan is shown to be a weak, bumbling, gambling addicted idiot.  He flails around trying to get the loan shark to pardon his large debt.The unbelievable antics in this book are especially irritating.  We are expected to believe that Dugan can operate his vehicle, scale fence walls, clean up an abandoned cottage, and kidnap a woman while suffering from a broken arm so severe that the bone is protruding from the skin, with only the aid of a bandage and some stolen morphine.  The fact that Dugan doesn't develop gangrene from the injury is idiotic.One reason I really wanted to continue with this series is because of the issue of the protagonist's mother and stepfather...the latter being horribly abusive to the former.  That bit of plot line had been left up in the air at the end of the first book and I was anxious to see how it progressed.Again, at the halfway mark, this part of the story took a bizarre turn.  Where Ellen and her brother, Jim, had once stood united in their concern for their battered mother (currently in the hospital after having fallen into a coma from being pushed down the stairs by her husband) suddenly Jim turns against Ellen for no apparent reason.  Ellen and Jim's mother is another weak character, seeming to be totally enamored of her abuser and not out of fear, but because she must love the abuse.Ellen is the only one who doesn't want to just sweep the issue under the rug and 'play nice'.  Her refusal to do so estranges her from the rest of her family.  This makes absolutely no sense, as she and her brother had formerly been very close and on the same page about the issue.The rest of the book is nothing but lazy writing on the part of the author.  It's as if M.A. Comley just suddenly became very bored with the book and decided to write whatever came to mind to get it over with and wrap it all up in a tidy bow.After more bumbling around by Charles Dugan, it is finally revealed that he set the fire that killed his family (which was not a surprise at all).  The surprise was that his 'reason' for doing this was to save his family from the retribution that the loan shark had meted out to him.  It is offhandedly mentioned that he must have done this as a result of head trauma sustained from the beating...whatever.On the family front of the story, another 'tra-la-la' moment occurs when Jim, for the second time, tricks Ellen into coming to his house to be confronted by their mother and her abuser.  Suddenly, it seems that the evil stepfather has NOT pushed his beloved down the stairs, but that it was actually an accident.The story ends with Ellen apologizing to this collective bunch of idiots and asking to start fresh.  Revolting.Ellen is the only redeeming character in this book and in the end she was sacrificed so that the author could finish up the book on a 'happy' note.  What a massive disappointment after the raw, engaging story line of the first book.And sadly, even the use of charming British phrases played itself out with the word 'scrummy' being overused to the point of nausea.