The 2022 recipient of the Jan Michalski Award for excellence in reporting on human rights issues by a European writer, The Bone Whisperers is an account of the author's reporting and involvement over the course of several years with those whose delicate and morally essential task it has been to exhume and identify the victims found in mass graves throughout the war-torn regions of the world, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of the ongoing process over the past two decades, led by the International Commission on Missing Persons, to recover and identify the remains and reunite the victims with their families.
Tervonen follows two women in particular involved in this extremely important yet heart-wrenching work; one, Senem, who has pioneered a method to match DNA from bone samples, and the other Darija, who tries to obtain blood samples from the survivors and their families to find a genetic match to that of the victims.