Anne Mallory's "Total Surrender"

Grade: B-

passion rating: warm

Rarely have I so looked forward to a book as I did Anne Mallory’s Total Surrender, the third book in her Secrets series. My favorite historical romance—thus far—of 2011 is One Night is Never Enough, the second book in the series. One Night is Never Enough introduced the hero of this book, the brooding, seemingly violent Andreas Merrick. In Total Surrender, the taciturn and remote Andreas finds his world upended by the gentle, chatty Phoebe Pace. I enjoyed their love story tremendously, but I found the plot surrounding the two difficult to comprehend.

Andreas is a dark hero, a man with a terribly abusive past and a brutal present. He runs a vast criminal empire in London with his brother (the hero of One Night is Never Enough) who is currently out of the country on his honeymoon. Normally Andreas could run the underworld in his sleep but his life becomes disordered when Phoebe enters his life. Her family owns a carriage manufacturing company which Andreas—unbeknownst to Phoebe—has been trying to destroy as part of a complex revenge plot against another man whom Andreas has hated for years. Andreas isn’t the only one with secrets in this story. Phoebe’s father is suffering from dementia, her brother is missing, and she, clandestinely, has been running the carriage company.

Phoebe slowly inserts herself into Andreas’s life much to his astonishment. He terrifies almost all who know him and he is used to intimidating everyone. Phoebe is not only not intimidated by him; she’s attracted to him and is determined to win his trust and his heart. Their interactions are a joy to read. Andreas’s cunning and manipulative intelligence is no match for Phoebe’s ability to genuinely charm Andreas (and all who work for him). I loved their verbal interchanges as well as Andreas’ inner musings.

Ms. Mallory is unmatched in her ability to write interesting, original, compelling characters. Phoebe, Andreas, and all who surround them are written exceedingly clearly and well. One of the delights of the novel is the dialogue Ms. Mallory writes for each and every character. As the (mostly) men in her novel talk to one another, each has an entertaining and discrete voice. Andreas’s revenge plot is exceedingly complicated and Ms. Mallory advances her story with clues casually dropped in conversation between not only Andreas and Phoebe but all those in the novel. I loved “listening” to the characters converse but couldn’t quite get the traces of information they shared to coalesce into an evident plot. The story was blurry and indistinct—even by the novel’s end, I wasn’t completely sure I understood exactly what had happened.

The last quarter of the book is rushed and not nearly as satisfying as all that has come before it. I wanted more passion between Andreas and Phoebe, more support for Andreas’s character change, and more information about what happened and why to Phoebe’s brother. I truly disliked the epilogue Ms. Mallory tacked on to the end of her tale—she’s a much better author than her pat almost saccharine ending suggests.  

I enjoyed Total Surrender but I didn’t love it. It’s not as strong a book as the two that precede it both of which are superb. I still rank Ms. Mallory as one of the best historical romance novelists writing today and look forward to her next book. I hope is better than the good but not great Total Surrender.