Twenty-five-year-old Honey McGuinness decided to bury herself in Skid Row in order to start a new life. Haunted by tragic childhood circumstances that left her with a painful limp, she chose to live among the anonymous and forsaken people.

She hired on as a food server at the local Salvation Mission, found an apartment in a building that had seen better days, and settled into her new life. She just started feeling she was in the right place when her best friend Billy was gunned down in a hail of bullets.

When Honey rushed to his side, all she could do was hold him in her arms while she waited for an ambulance. When he died before help arrived, she was further stunned when she found a listening device attached to his waist, hidden beneath his clothes.

Knowing Billy would not have understood the implication of wearing such a device, Honey was determined to find out who had convinced him to wear the tape recorder, and why.

Stubbornly staying in her apartment when everyone else moved out because of the increased drug traffic and crime in the neighborhood, she decided to track down her best friend’s killer.

Diving back into the desolation of Skid Row, Honey decided she would do whatever it took to catch Billy’s murderer. Along the way, she met a big, burly cop who befriended her, and stood by her side while putting his own life in danger.

Threshold is Bonnie Kozek’s debut thriller and it is a doozy. Written in first person using the hard-boiled style, Threshold is a strong, solid first offering. Kozek deftly takes the reader into the nitty-gritty underbelly of life on the streets in a seedy section of the city.

The fast-paced narrative grabs from the beginning and immediately dives into the degradation of drugs and crime in the inner bowels typical of large cities everywhere.

The street comes to life with the typical, expected cast of characters, such as the drug lord, the drug runner, the priest, and the hungry whom line-up for food at the Mission.

However, the novel is also filled with the unexpected, keeping the story moving along at quite a clip. This novel will not disappoint fans of hard-boiled fiction, and will soon have them longing for more about this addicting new character.