About Clea
Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist and an award-winning author. She was a member 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 subse
Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist and an award-winning author. She was a member 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 in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The Bone Woman, Clea’s memoir of her experiences working for the war crimes tribunals, 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.
Clea 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 designed to address the backlog of tens of thousands of unidentified bodies in the US.
Clea 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, Clea was raised in England, East Africa and both coasts of the United States as her parents made documentary films.
Clea now writes fiction. Her first novel, Freezing, 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 Clea'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 into 2025, with Deadly Evidence just published in April and the newly-announced Bones of Evidence to follow in January 2026.
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 Clea'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.
