Clea Koff is an award-winning author and a forensic anthropologist who was part of the first international forensic team brought together by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals to investigate evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, commencing in Rwanda with Physicians for Human Rights in 1996.  She subsequently participated in missions for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. 

Koff's memoir, The Bone Woman, recounts this work and the human stories behind the headlines. The Bone Woman was published by Random House in 2004 and has been translated into ten languages and published in fourteen countries.  Among other  honors, The Bone Woman was awarded the Nancy (France) Human Rights Book Prize, was a National Public Radio Best, a Discover Magazine Top 20 Science Book, and an Editor's Pick of the Foreign Policy Association. 

Koff went on to co-coordinate the Anthropology Laboratory of the United Nations Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus on behalf of Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF) and she founded the non-profit  Missing Persons Identification Resource Center to develop forensic profiles of missing persons to help rectify the backlog of tens of thousands of unidentified bodies in the US.  

Koff holds a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and was trained by Dr. Walt Birkby while a Master's student in the graduate forensic anthropology program at the University of Arizona. 

Born in England to an American father of Polish and Russian descent and a Tanzanian mother, Koff was raised in England, East Africa and both coasts of the United States as her parents made documentary films. 

Today, Koff writes fiction shaped by her experiences and the stories revealed by bones. Her novels have reached readers around the world beginning with Freezing, which was published by Severn House in 2011 and by Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson in translation in 2012 when it was nominated for French ELLE's Prix des Lectrices. 

Silent Evidence, the first book in Koff's Jayne and Steelie forensic thriller series was published in August 2024 by HarperCollins UK's Avon imprint as part of a three-book deal, continuing with Deadly Evidence, published in April 2025 in the UK and January 2026 in the US. The third book in the series, Bones of Evidence was published on January 29, 2026 in the UK, and will be followed by the US publication in November.  

The Jayne and Steelie Series audiobooks are being published in translation in a five-country, three-book deal with Audible for Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.  2024 also saw two of Koff's novels published in translation: Freezing as The Bone Language by Eksmo and Surfacing, the sequel to the French Freezing by Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson.  2025 brought Deadly Evidence in Russian by Eksmo as The Truth Under the Skin: All the Dead Speak the Same Language. Just published in August 2026 is Tras los Huesos (Behind the Bones) from Audible (Jayne Hall y Steelie Lander Vol. 3 en Español).