Caris Wheeler, the Forgotten Spy, is an agent with the CIA.
Was an agent. Was being the main word here because she has not been an operative for quite a few years, emphasis on the word 'quite'. To explain just a tad more, there is a passage in her adventures that talks about "back in the day when she worked for the CIA. She'd been a case worker and had worked the world over. Besides handling spies, she'd operated undercover and did some wet work herself. These were mostly out of black sites that were off the books. It had been forty years since she used those skills and she was rusty."
An interesting point that will play a role in things in these stories is the fact that the timeframe is a few years in the future. This is evidenced by the fact that self-driving cars are not only ubiquitous, they are required. "These days, only cops were allowed to drive cars. A couple other tidbits like that lace the pages.
It is not unusual to have a series about a retired spy but ... forty years retired? Wheeler put in her time and left the Agency when she was around 55 years old. She is, when we first meet her, 95 years old. "She's an old school spy who traveled the world when she was younger, working primarily in Asia and Eastern Europe." Now she lives alone, having lost her husband as well as her daughter and her husband in a car accident many years before, on a small tract of land a fair distance from the nearest neighbor because she has come to crave her privacy.
Why is she suddenly back "in the game" after so many years away and so very much older with all of the pains and aches and affirmities that is normal for anyone nearly a century old? A blurb for the first short adventure tells us that "Caris Wheeler is a long retired spy who has been given a second chance."
What is this second chance? Well, you need to read the adventures to learn more but it does involve this old lady living on her own and not wanting trouble getting pulled nevertheless into a messy problem and as a result, she is not as old as she used to be.
Good Lines:
- Observation made by Caris upon finding someone who had been stabbed, "The sensation of a knife penetrating you is unimaginable until it happens".