Action-packed page-turners

The common phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is quite literal with regard to Hallee Bridgeman’s Love & Honor series: You can’t judge this series by the cover art of its books.

The series depicts the lives of an Army Special Forces team. As the daughter and wife of former servicemen, she knows a thing or two about military life.

But the covers, sporting prominent faces of attractive women, seem to promise cheesy romance inside. While women play important roles in each plot, the stories largely focus on the relationships between the soldiers, their individual challenges, and their real-life problems.

Highlighting a different soldier in each book, Bridgeman weaves team members throughout the series, ­creating a seamless progression.

Every book is an action-packed page-turner, featuring firefights, ­explosions, and other life-and-death ­situations. But Bridgeman successfully balances high-octane scenes with ­character development.

The plots do contain a smidgen of romance. After all, they are marketed as “romantic suspense.” Unfortunately, a cursory glance at the cover art might dissuade some potential readers who would enjoy the well-written stories.

Honor Bound opens in an African jungle as a U.S. Army Special Forces team engages in a firefight with a warlord’s guerrilla fighters. The conflict spills into a remote village where Dr. Cynthia Myers runs an OB clinic. As the only doctor for miles, she treats the gravely injured men. She and team leader Rick Norton are drawn to each other, but both feel called by God to their chosen careers, and her pacifist convictions clash with his military profession.

In Word of Honor, an ecoterrorist group is blowing up oil pipelines around the world. The organization’s communication system funnels through a mosque in Istanbul. FBI Special Agent Lynda Culter agrees to go undercover to ferret out the ring leader. Her dilemma: The teammate she must pretend to be married to is Sgt. Bill Sanders, the former boyfriend who broke her heart. Holed up together, she discovers he’s not the ­person he was in college.

In Honor’s Refuge, Melissa Braxton, director of a domestic abuse shelter, has been in love with former soldier Phil Osbourne for a long time. He’s secretly attracted to her but the former drug addict and amputee believes Melissa deserves better. Phil enlists his Army buddies to rescue Melissa’s ­sister Lola and her children from her abusive Colombian drug dealer husband. They take refuge at Melissa’s shelter—until Lola’s ­husband finds them.

This series includes an e-book prequel, Love in Any Language, and a fifth book releasing February 2023, Love Makes Way.