It was more like the afternoon, but I finally figured it out. I felt disappointed this book wasn’t a mystery story like More Bitter than Death (EF#5 - reviewed on Myshelf.com). Ashes and Bones is a study in terrorism on an individual scale. Think of the school bully who kicked your dog when nobody else was looking.

I spent a lot of time aggravated with Emma’s friends and husband. Everybody thinks Emma is losing it because she thinks a man, presumed dead, is stalking her through her friends and family. Dr. Tony Markham’s boat was lost at sea in a storm and his body never recovered. He has been gone four years, but his attack on Emma and her student still haunts her dreams and now her days as well. Initially it seems to be just harmless pranks: flowers to her in-laws with Emma’s signature, a pornographic picture and letter to a colleague, turning up in a crowded place and blowing a kiss at her. The stakes change however when people start to get hurt and even die.

Emma’s friends are right, she is losing it. She is afraid to go out, afraid for the people around her and down deep, she’s fears she is imagining Tony. Her only moments without fear come when she is at the dojo practicing Krav Maga with such intensity that nothing else can intrude. By the end of the third chapter Ashes and Bones can only end one of two ways: either Emma will awaken from her coma caused by falling from a cliff during her vacation in Hawaii, or she will use her hand-to-hand skills to summarily defeat the foe on her home turf. I leave that mystery for you to investigate.