Helen Warwick is an agent with the CIA.
Well, was an agent. Retired now. Fifty-five years old and starting a new life as someone not constantly on the go, heading to missions where very bad people doing very deadly things needed very drastic action taken to stop them. Warwick had been one of those stoppers for quite a few years and now she was done with it. Not willingly, mind you. Mandatory retirement because of her age. Definitely a victim of ageism and not the least bit shy about growling at it but do not ever put Warwick down as any sort of victim.
Besides, it gives her a chance to try to reconnect with her grown children that largely grew up with Mom heading out to some part of the world in her capacity as a trade representative for the State Department, often gone for several weeks at a time and then more than once returning with odd bruises and scrapes from silly falls and such mishaps. Now she wants to try to get to re-know her two sons and one daughter and maybe even her husband.
Case in point, when we are introduced to her, she is knocking on the very impressive door of her middle son, a successful art dealer, arriving to spend some time puppy-sitting where her son and his husband went on the town. A woman who has had to face vicious people holding guns or knives is anxious to do nothing more strenuous than making sure the young dog did not destroy a very nice house. Son Peter is highly skeptical about his mother's motive but ... good intentions and all. That was before the gunmen break into the house and start shooting at her and the puppy and she takes them all down.
Of course, the house is pretty messed up with the bullet holes and the blood but the puppy is fine and so is Warwick, save for the odd bruise and scrape. Naturally Pete is irate and the police highly dubious and her old boss from the Agency concerned but Warwick is well aware that her days in the thick of the action are by no means over because she wants to know who was behind it and to make them sorry they messed up.