Scott Maverick is a police officer.
He is a very experienced veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department, a detective in their Homicide Division. He is not a spy and would not want to be one. He was a cop and his job - and his passion - is bringing to justice those who prey on innocent people. He has found to his dismay that there does not seem to be a scarcity of those sorts.
It is not surprising that someone with a last name as Maverick might be prone to go it alone and do things his own way, something we watch in the opening pages of his first recorded adventure. In this instance, he is chasing a man he has spent several months building a case against for three murders and Maverick is in no mood to wait for backup. This impulsiveness will allow him to almost snare his target; it will also find him encountering that killer's little pet - "eight hundred pounds of orange, black, and white fur" - a tiger. Not your normal sort of house pet.
It will be this failed apprehension that will throw Maverick's case in a totally unexpected direction and place him directly into the path of a KGB scheme to cause major disruption in the States. The time frame for Maverick's sojourn into the cloak and dagger world is the 1980s. Reagan is in the White House and the Cold War is still very much active. As the Soviet Union begins its first steps to unraveling, those in the spy and sabotage business in that government are certain something drastic needs to be done to defeat America immediately. Maverick will find the hunt for one untrained killer will pit him against a large number of very sophisticated and dangerous ones.
Maverick is described as "an imposing figure standing at six-two and tipping the scales at better than two-twenty", a "barrel-chested detective" with "thick arms" and a "voice was as thick and intimidating as his arms".
Forced to work with the irascible Maverick is another highly decorated and experience cop named Travis Chambers, a man whose area of expertise is the Vice trade. To say these two do not get along with they first meet is to be kind. Chambers does not endear himself to Maverick when he tells Maverick that he was one of the "the big leaguers" with no need to "draft you up from the minors".