Su-Lin Kelly is a freelance agent.
Born in the Himalayan Mountains of Tibet, the first memories Su-Lin Kelly had were as a young girl being raised by the mysterious Mata Wong. It was from Wong that she learned she was the daughter of a great adventurer nicknamed Chinese Kelly who came to the small town of Tang Kho and met and fell in love with a young woman. There he chose to settle down and soon had a daughter in Su-Lin. Several years passed before a bandit band killed both of Su-Lin's parents.
Mata Wong ran the renowned Shan Tal cloister, a retreat dedicated to teaching the art of love and sex to young women destined to be the mistresses of the world's most powerful men. Su-Lin learned her lessons well and became highly sought after. It was the incredibly wealthy Rene Cartes who finally won her.
A few years spent with Rene were the best of Su-Lin's life and she was incredibly happy. When he was assassinated, however, her love of passion turned to a passion for revenge. She learned the arts of combat and murder with the same ardor she had trained in her earlier lessons. Soon, his murderers were destroyed.
Su-Lin was left with a new love of adventure. She was also left Rene's fantastic fortune. She combined these two to become one of the world's greatest freelance spies, working usually for an independent intelligence agency known as the Nest.
It is at this point that the genre of the series takes a dramatic shift. Kelly will discover in her first adventure that the real Su-Lin Kelly had died in that bandit attack that took her father and that Wong was really her mother and the Cloister was also a scientific think-tank where the secrets of cloning, among other things, had been discovered.
Kelly was a clone. When one body was killed in action or wore out over time, as they tend to do apparently, her memories are implanted into a new body and the new Kelly takes her place.