Jack Emery is a reporter.
He is, from what we discover quite early, a pretty darn good one, experienced and respected for his talents. We learn that in a prequel story detailing the time he spent embedded with a Marine detachment in Afghanistan, putting his life daily on the line to get an accurate story of what was happening on the other side of world from those reading his words.
In the first present-day adventure we have for him, it is a slightly different Emery that greets us. This one awakens in the morning in a hotel room in New York City, his face lying in a small pool of vomit from a long night of drinking away his troubles. They did not, of course, actually leave him and now in addition to that those problems he has a mess to clean up and one horrific hangover to survive.
When he is not involved in what he knows is 'self-annihilation', he is trying to keep his job with the New York Standard. He has given up trying to save his marriage to Erin, also a darn good reporter and a colleague/rival at the same newspaper. That is certainly history. His job just might be salvageable, though, if he can leave the booze behind. Far easier said than done.
But as we follow Emery, we will see life throw a whole lot more at him than a shaky career, a failed marriage, and a problem with the bottle. And in first covering and then taking a more active role in the stories that he will uncover, Emery will certainly have his hands full. For one important thing, his own life will be in them.
His career will change a great deal along and he will move from reporting on what the powers-that-be are doing to being behind the scenes of those powers as he is asked to help set policy for the current U.S. President.