The Bone Woman

To prosecute charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, one fact that must be established absolutely: are the bodies those of ordinary people, rather than combatants? It is the role of forensic anthropologists to answer this question by proving precisely who the victims were and how they were killed. Their investigations into age, sex, ethnicity, and other characteristics return individual identities to lifeless remains.In 1996, Clea Koff was a 23-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in California. Then, after the cataclysmic horror of Rwanda, she was sent to that country by the U.N. to work with a small team exhuming victims of the genocide. Her job was to find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial. Over the next four years, her gruelling investigations into these, and other, murderous events transformed her from an idealistic student to a war crimes veteran. Clea Koff's unflinching account of those years - what she found in the Rwandan hills and in Srebrenica; how it affected her; and who wentto trial based on evidence she collected - makes mesmerizing reading, alternately riveting, frightening and, miraculously, hopeful.Even as she recounts the hellish working conditions, the stifling U.N. bureaucracy and the agony of survivors, Clea Koff retains her passionate belief in humanity and justice.