Charles Edward 'Eddie' Grant is a part-time agent for the CIA.
In the parlance of the intelligence community, Grant is known as an "unofficial", in this case a person who volunteers to be the Paris eyes and ears for his CIA and Desert Storm friend Icky Crane. Crane was a college friend of Grant's and both had been surprised to find themselves serving under the same American major general during the first Gulf War. After Crane had later joined the Agency and eventually worked his way up the promotion ladder, he would reach the position of a department head and that is when he would rekindle his friendship with Grant.
In his public life, Eddie is heir to a great American industrial fortune and an investing genius who has multiplied the wealth his father left behind. He is just entering his 40's when we meet him in the first recorded adventure and lives in an apartment on the top floor of a hotel in Paris, which he found when it was in need of repair, bought it, and had it restored to its previous glory enough to have reached 4-star status. He is a widower with no one close to him romantically; seven years before we meet up with Grant, he had suffered the loss through murder first of his father and then shortly thereafter his own wife and young son; making the terrible loss even worse in his mind was the fact that he never understood why they were targeted.
Grant has an interesting background. His father was from a wealthy American family, founder and chief stockholder in the prosperous Norway Steel company, successful before WWI and now impressively so after his father and his French mother has used their contacts and their acumen to be a major part of the Marshall Plan of reconstruction in Europe. "During his youth in Paris he had been fully and unconsciously French; during his college years in the United States he had worked very hard at becoming American. Then came his experience of war in Kuwait and Iraq, the first time he had felt completely at home outside of Paris".
It would be art and not espionage which would pull Grant out of his comfortable existence and shove him rudely into the line of fire, literally; or rather the theft of artwork by the Nazis decades before and the desire for many to either keep what they owned or steal it all themselves. But the trade in seemingly priceless artwork is a great way to move money around largely unnoticed and that is something terror groups and would-be dictators are always interested in. And once involved in stopping such activities, it is hard for someone like Grant to go back to serenity.