From the blurb – female FBI agent takes over a new field office in Ohio, discovers a new designer drug, bumps heads with her boss, sizes up a jailbird snitch, people get dead all around her – you’d think this is a run-of-the-murder-mill, modern American crime thriller. Think again.

Seldom do you find such unspeakable subjects as the themes in Full Tilt Boogie being described with the near-poetic precision of Robb White’s acid prose. This novel is not for the faint-hearted nor the lily-livered. There’s blood and there’s butchery and there’s absolutely nothing pretty to see here.

Yet it’s almost impossible to tear your eyes away from the page, as FBI investigator Jade Hui plunges ever deeper into the heart of darkness. The staccato scenes jump-cut from bare-knuckle brawling to skin-tingling seduction to sleazy snuff movies and torture porn, by way of prostitution, mutilation and exploitation and with a few war crimes thrown in for good measure.

One thing’s for sure: Hui is caught in the cross-hairs of an international narcotics ring but she won’t back down. The collateral damage to her terrier-like tenacity turns out to be terminal for the people around her. There are a few flinch-inducing moments where her own survival seems mighty moot, too.

It’s a harsh lens to look through, but Full Tilt Boogie brings the same intense scrutiny to the type of moral degeneracy which is similarly showcased in American Psycho, Fight Club and No Country For Old Men. And like those titles it’s a challenging but thought-provoking read.