"Everything converged on Atlantic City that week. Me. Four boxes of crazy clothes. A hoard of people with money to burn. And the blizzard of '96..."

A promising, if unadventurous opening - were it the opening to Jesse May's bizarre Shut Up And Deal. It crops up in here just as the book starts on winding down, and suddenly we start and think a plot of sorts is kicking in. It ain't.

Mickey is a young poker pro - "another sod with dirty hands" - playing the circuit. He's neither especially good nor especially bad: "to be in action, to have a bankroll, to be focused" is enough. Shut Up And Deal is his freewheeling memoir of gambling and gamblers. And, er, that's it. There are no characters beyond the people he sits down at the table with, no stories more than his stories of gambling, of other gamblers, of the things he hears about other gamblers. Outside of the casinos and their "perceptions of chaos" - "no clocks, no windows, free alcohol, bright lights, bells" - he scarcely exists. They make money to play poker to make money. "It's not that it's impossible to make money at poker in the long run. It's just that you'd be better off packing up your stuff and going to Alaska to dig for gold."

Shut Up And Deal reads like a book written by someone who never got over the powerhouse first hour of Scorsese's Casino. It's the novel as voice-over: we see the swirl of tables, the whirl of the cards gunning away beneath May's scatter-gun prose. This is terrific, rattling, nervous writing, a book with a musical rhythm.

"You really need a lot of money to play poker. A lot lot. So much that if you had it all you might as well not play anymore, unless you got nothing else to do or are just out for blood money."

It's a book about poker, but not a book you need to understand poker to appreciate. It's not a book about the cards so much as the way they fall. It's about how the game is both part skill and part luck. "People think mastering the skill part is hard," he concludes, "but they're wrong."

But ultimately this is a book about obsession. It's about the way the poker rooms are lit, about the way they smell. It's about the hotel rooms you rent and hardly see because you play eighteen hours straight and don't stop, not even to use the bathroom. It's about knowing who to trust and about knowing not to trust anyone. It's about winning money and losing money and knowing that the ups will always outrank the downs. It's a book that is about nothing even while it's telling you everything. A strange and intoxicating read.