To put it bluntly, it’s very tough for a book featuring all action and dialogue to hold my attention.

Right off the bat on page one of All Jacked Up, Library of Congress librarian Aubrey Sullivan is plummeted into a shoot-out and an abduction (in the middle of said Library of Congress, by the way) by a sexy and mysterious man who claims he’s out to save her life. Turns out that man is Jack Mitchell, an FBI Special Agent who’s being set up by unknown parties so his bosses believe that he’s a mole for a big time Columbian drug dealer.

The reason Jack abducted Aubrey? It seems that the librarian (complete with a photographic memory) somehow unwittingly came across information that the drug dealer can’t afford to get out and, to complicate matters further, whatever Aubrey knows will also clear Jack from suspicion back at the Bureau. Of course, Aubrey has no idea what she knows, so the challenge for Jack and Aubrey, when they’re not running from pursuers, is to try to piece together the critical information from the vast amount of data in her brain.

Jack and Aubrey hit the trail, heading south down the Blue Ridge Parkway. They are pursued by bad guys. They get shot at. They talk. (Man, do they talk!)

That’s the book. Run, run, run, shoot, shoot, shoot, talk, talk, talk. And, believe it or not, there’s no sex to liven things up since what little there is takes place with the bedroom door slammed shut. To be honest, however, worse than the no sex thing is the fact that there is absolutely no chemistry between the leads, so it’s not very likely that sex would have ultimately helped matters much.

Truthfully, the characters of Jack and Aubrey generated no chemistry on the part of this reader either. They felt wooden. The book felt wooden. The plot felt wooden. The dialogue and the author’s prose are adequate, but since I never cared about the characters – who remained resolutely paper-thin throughout the book – and because my eyes were glazing over due to the book’s lackluster plot, not to even mention all that talking, those aren’t much of a positive.

Most readers like an occasional dose of mind candy and, quite honestly, mine is more likely to be in the area of light historical fiction, while I try to save my romantic suspense reading for the good stuff. Still, as we all know, mind candy is a personal thing and if you’re in the mood for action-y, talk-y, and cartoon-y, you might be able to fill a few hours with this book. That’s about the only recommendation I can muster.