Linda Darby is a day-trader.
Her specialty is buying and selling stocks from the comfort of her computer, placed on a desk in her oceanfront condo in the "let-the-world-go-by beach town" of Sea Crest, Oregon. That strategic desk placement also allows her to maintain her leave-be-alone lifestyle while still watching "the comings and goings of her neighbors, whose lives seemed more exciting than her own".
We are told that Darby is good enough at her vocation to have purchased her condo with cash and to stash away "several jumbo CDs that provided a steady living income". Staying home frees her from the kinds of questions about her personal life that would be inevitable in an office setting. After her unpleasant divorce, not having to talk about what happened and why was a relief.
Darby is described initially as "prettier than most but otherwise in many ways an ordinary woman living an ordinary life" which makes it so unusual that as we meet her, she has already been "marked for death". This threatened demise will bring with it a major change to her life style.
Far too rapidly approaching her 40th birthday, Darby was happy living alone, the remembrance of her failed marriage which ended some years before enough to keep her from wanting anything in the way of a relationship. When she found "her celibacy growing intolerable", as it did now and then, she chose to drive to other towns and hook up for a single night rather than risk anything tarnishing her homefront.
This quiet but satisfying life is not the sort of existence one would expect to bring the threat of danger and even death but it comes anyways and just when she thinks she is likely to meet her death, a stranger steps in to rescue her, defeating the two men who were posing the peril. The man, she would later learn was named Ryan Testler, told her to race home and to not call the police, warning her they could not be trusted. That was the way she was introduced to Testler's world and soon she would become more than intimately involved with it and him.