Just Finished Reading Two If By Sea by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Two If By Sea is a 2016 novel by American writer Jacquelyn Mitchard...it's my first book of hers I've read.  The protagonist is Frank Mercy, a retired cop whose parents and grandparents raised and trained horses back in Wisconsin.  Frank has been residing for some time in the Brisbane area of Queensland, Australia, and has married Natalie from one of the families he has befriended there.  But on Christmas Eve, a tsunami sweeps the coastline and kills his wife, along with much of her family.  Deep in grief, Frank finds himself rescuing from the raging waters a young boy who he soon discovers has a special gift and that some nefarious, ruthless characters are pursuing him for that ability.  Frank takes him back to Wisconsin where he begins to train horses himself...read the rest of the book yourself to find out what I deliberately left out (a lot of stuff), not wanting to spoil the story...

There are questions...based on the nature of Ian, the boy that Frank "adopts" as his own son...about Frank's many decisions throughout the story that the author could have addressed but didn't: I think that was a missed opportunity to make the story's message stronger.  Plus, it just seemed to me as if Mitchard had some story themes she wanted to throw into a story: Australia, tsumani, family tragedy, strangely gifted little kid, horse training and the equestrian sport, even an English country estate...and decided to stick them all in there and try to make the pieces fit together, which in my opinion they didn't.  I also felt that Frank's behavior toward the obvious, established threat that the bad guys posed toward himself and his loved ones was strangely cavalier as he was continually leaving others unguarded and vulnerable.  Don't get me wrong: as stories go I liked it and the characters were decent...but looking back, it seemed kind of sloppy and the author tried to put too many disjointed elements into it along with curiously-behaving characters.  I'm just guessing, but Jacquelyn Mitchard's many previous works were probably better...