Brazen Virtue

Brazen Virtue is a novel by the American writer Nora Roberts, published in 1988 and set in Washington.

Kathleen is a teacher left with almost nothing after a divorce, saving to hire a lawyer to fight for her son, and the telephone work she does at night is the only way she can see to do it. Her sister Grace arrives for a holiday and is alarmed by the neighbourhood, the job and the danger she believes Kathleen is in, and then her sister is murdered. The investigation settles on a man who is convenient rather than likely, and Grace, who has spent her career inventing crimes, cannot leave it alone. Roberts writes the book as suspense with a romance inside it, and the detective in charge is the man Grace has to work with whether either of them wants the arrangement.

It is one of the author's earlier suspense novels, written under her own name in the late 1980s and reissued several times since, and it is set in a Washington that she returned to in later books.