Published by Avon on the 29th August 2024
Clea Koff, who is mixed-race and Jewish, was born in 1972 to a Tanzanian mother and an American father, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Kimera, with them around the world. She spent her childhood in England, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and the United States.
By the time she was a teenager, she had decided to study human osteology, which she did first in California. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Stanford University. Koff then went on to the master’s program in forensic anthropology at the University of Arizona. She completed her master’s degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, after combining her studies with working for the UN between 1996 and 2000.
As a 23-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in California, Koff joined a small team of UN scientists exhuming victims of the genocide in Rwanda. Her job was to find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial, and to help relatives to identify their loved ones. Koff captured the events in her memoir The Bone Woman, which was published in 2004.
Jayne and Steelie founded Agency 32/1 with one purpose in mind: using their specialist forensic skills to help police solve crimes.
When a bundle of frozen body parts fall out of a van on a Los Angeles freeway, FBI agent Scott Houston knows just where to go for an off-the-record post-mortem. But to everyone’s horror, Jayne and Steelie quickly determine the parts aren’t from one body. The body parts are from multiple bodies.
A serial killer is on the loose. Worse, Scott’s call has put Jayne and Steelie’s lives in jeopardy, as their unique skills can uncover evidence to unmask the killer. Can they find the killer, before the killer finds them?
I found this lacking in background so I had trouble working out the relationship between them and their history. The principle story was excellent but maybe it needed a first book to understand the dynamics of the jobs and why they did this and set up the agency.
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