Veronica 'Ronnie' Tracey is a private investigator.
Her patch is the modest city of Upper Hutt in New Zealand, part of the Wellington metropolitan area. She has not been running this small agency for long but it is already turning a nice profit and things keep looking up for her and her partner in the endeavor, said business having the interesting name of "Wherefore Art Thou".
"I have a knack for finding the unfindable," she tells us early on. "My mind wandered back to when I left the Service and founded my own business. It's not entirely my business. It's a partnership. Stephanie takes care of the accounts and keeps things running when she's not watching the cricket, rugby, or answering the fire pager. Then there is Jennifer, who is the other full-time investigator and a volunteer firefighter like Stephanie. We do regular PI-type things that include security work for companies, drug testing, loss prevention, and investigations into suspected sabotage/foul play. As well as that, there are always the unfaithful spouse cases that keep bread on the table and coffee in our pots. And I do some occasional locating work for various government agencies."
When Tracey talks of 'various government' she means exactly that. She once worked for New Zealands' intelligence organization but when they call to 'ask' her to help out in yet another important matter in the first recorded adventure, even she is surprised to learn they are asking on behalf of the U.S.'s Department of Homeland Security. Later we will see her also hobnobbing - well, so to speak - with the CIA as well as Australia's entry into the alphabet agency soup.
In addition to her PI work and her sideline gig of locating people for the Intelligence communities, Tracey spends a lot of her time on personal matters which makes her daily life very interesting to us but oddly stressful to her. She has a retired greyhound as a pet and it needs a good deal of attention. She has a male cousin who is always dropping in for one reason or another and who has a very unusual love life, and - here is the biggie - she has her 94-year-old Nana and that feisty woman's friends, aka the Cronies of Doom. You have to read of their exploits yourself. Good think Tracey has "a sense of humour and the enduring knowledge that everything is temporary".