In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of sixteen scientists chosen by the United Nations to unearth the physical evidence of the Rwandan genocide. Over the next four years, Koff’s grueling investigations took her across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

The Bone Woman is Koff’s unflinching, riveting account of her seven UN missions to Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, as she shares what she saw, how it affected her, who was prosecuted based on evidence she found, and what she learned about the world. Yet even as she recounts the hellish nature of her work and the heartbreak of the survivors, she imbues her story with purpose, humanity, and a sense of justice. A tale of science in service of human rights, The Bone Woman is, even more profoundly, a story of hope and enduring moral principles.

“Every detail — the marbles in a dead boy's pocket — seems to tell the same story, of human suffering on a scale nearly too awful to contemplate. But with each Body that Koff can prove belonged to a non-combatant, it becomes easier to successfully prosecute charges of war crimes. Her work is the place where science, idealism and humanism most intersect.”

The Independent on Sunday

“The beauty and significance of Koff’s work and of her drive to do it come through most powerfully when she is crouching over a mass grave, untangling limbs, scraping dirt from a corpse’s clothes and finding, within what most of us would see as horror, something human that speaks. . . . Surprising, compelling, and worth reading.”

The Washington Post Book World

“Only Koff herself can explain what happens in the heart when the living meet the dead. . . . [The Bone Woman relives] what a good many people cannot imagine ever enduring. . . . Koff’s seven ‘missions’ into fields of death erase all qualitative differences between horrors dreamed and horrors unearthed.”

Los Angeles Times

Koff knows that bones talk, and she simply lets the bones she exhumes give testimony. . . . In descriptions free of sensationalism or sentimentality, [this] emotional distance gives The Bone Woman its pared-down power.”

–MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’s Fresh Air

The daughter of a Tanzanian mother and an American father, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues, Clea Koff spent her childhood in England, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and the United States. She now divides her time between Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.

From the Hardcover edition.