Michael North is an agent with The Board.
A good attention-grabbing blurb is worth a lot to the success of an adventure and the one for the first book was darned good: "The bullet in his brain isn't the problem. She is. Michael North is a hero, with a bullet in the brain to prove it. A bullet which has rewired his neural pathways and heightened his sense of intuition. A bullet which is driving him mad..." It goes on to add "working for an extra-governmental agency called The Board, North knows one thing for sure. He is very good at killing very bad guys. But what happens when a hero is ordered to kill a good woman rather than a bad man?
The bullet in the head is a key point in North's life. It was a 'gift' he received "on patrol outside Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan five years ago", fired by a sniper and landing "just short of the posterior parietal artery in the right temporo-parietal junction". The surgeons were able to remove the tiny pieces of bone the penetration caused but could not "extract the bullet without further catastrophic damage".
Interestingly, its presence brought EITHER frequent "hallucinations and delusions common after traumatic brain injury" and the belief, not shared with anyone, that "the bullet was driving him mad" OR acute awareness of his surroundings with an almost paranormal sense of the future. If it was the former, that was a bad thing. If it were the latter, so much the better!
After his career in the military was ended by the injury, North spent a couple of years first recovering (as much as he could) from it and then listlessly just existing. That is when the Board came calling and offered him a job, one that would make use of his skills at killing learned in the services and give him a feeling that he was contributing to the common good by eliminating very nasty people from the planet. It also made him a very acceptable chunk of change.
There was one odd side effect from his new vocation: "The problem with his job was he couldn't read about anyone dying without wondering who killed them, and whether he'd have done it better."
North was relatively satisfied with his new life, excluding the chunk of lead in his head, and would have happily continued getting the periodic packets in the mail detailing who and why and sometimes how his next assignment was. Then he was told to remove in a particularly unpleasant way a female Member of Parliament and there was no explanation as to why she was targeted. That bothered him. A lot. He decided to say no. Nobody says no to the Board. Ever.