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THRESHOLD: A Hard-boiled Thriller

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I won this on a quick giveaway from Melissa at Melissa's Bookshelf. It sounded interesting to me so I wanted to give it a shot. I'm pretty new to hard-boiled suspense/thriller books reading pretty much just the typical mainstream thrillers. I'm glad I got this book. It was a fast, enjoyable read. I really enjoyed the character of Honey McGuinness. She is not perfect, she has had a hard life and she knows it, but she moves on with her life. She has a lot of depth and even though she is not all good, she is really trying and she will do what she can for those she cares for, such as finding out who murdered her friend Billy, even if she has to risk her life, sanity and all she has worked for up until this point to find the murderer. The suspense line of the book was interesting, but I feel that the characters make the book, from the hardened character of Honey to the cowboy-cop, Skinner and the miscellaneous crew from Skid Row, you learn about all of them and their good and bad traits. The book had a very satisfactory ending but left me excited enough about the character of Honey to read the next in the series which will be out this year. I highly suggest reading Threshold if you enjoy suspense/thrillers with the hard-boiled edge, or even if you're not sure if you do and just want to try them. I think this is a wonderful book to try out the genre.

This book should come with a warning, not for general audiences, it is definitely X rated. Bonnie Kozesk's character Honey McGuinness reminds me of Mickey Spillane characters but with a feminine twist. The story starts as her Mother finally takes the leap of faith right off the balcony with her 8 year old daughter. Except Honey at the last moment decides to take the stairs. Author, Bonnie Kozek nails the rationale of a young woman who is as close to being lost as possible but never taking that last step. A chance meeting with a cop named Skinner may be her one and only hope for salvation. Ms. Kozek, mixes fiction with the dope sick reality of crack, giving the reader a fly on the wall experience into addiction.

Honey McGuinness lives to see another day in Bonnie's soon to be second book - Just Before Dawn, due out in 2009 with The Story of Why to follow in 2010.

Once you turn the first page of Ms Kozek's book you realize that you have genuinely crossed a threshold into a compelling world of street people, drugs, sex, crime, and most importantly, the world of Honey McGuiness. Honey is the hard-boiled, soft-hearted heroine of Threshold, and she keeps the reader asking for more.
This noir tale reminds one of the writings of Artaud and his theater of cruelty. The author investigates the bare, raw unconscious below the surface of our daily lives and fictions. This is much more than a noir novel....it is literature that shocks, provokes, and informs, but more than that, it makes us fall very much in love with Honey. I can't wait to read the next book.

Meet hard-core Honey McGuinnes who is the trash-talking street-wise ex-junkie narrator of this emotionally charged thriller. Yup, Honey has been on the receiving end of a cosmic high colonic, and she doesn't mind giving you all the gory matter-of-fact details of her damaged psyche. Nope, Honey couldn't give a toss when it comes to what people think of her because, as she so adamantly states throughout the story, she couldn't give less of a toss about herself. She's been eff'ed up, chewed up, and spit out by life, and so she has checked out, preferring the company of her own kind: the equally demented and damned of skid row. She has joined the Naked Lunch witness protection program, and her only connection to the world is the sewer, really. By day Honey works at the local mission serving food to the indigent, and by night she holes herself up in her dilapidated warehouse apartment and chills by playing sexy-hooker dress up by herself and getting psycho-sexual gratification with a nice warm enema. Yes, I said enema. Honey definitely has enough freaky fetishes and misanthropic drug-addict bravado to land herself the well paying gig of poster child for A&E's "Intervention" series. Honey is my kind of main character. She's a rubber-necker's dream come true.

But here is the kicker, it's all just show, a persona she clings to so she doesn't have to admit or face the guilt and shame she feels for abuses suffered in childhood. So she wisecracks, cuts-up her fellow inmates, and works in defensive posturing like a sculptress with a dull chisel. She even adopts a less educated slangy dialect full of "cuzes" and whatnot, but it reads fake and it feels fake, especially when she slips out of character and uses words like "nonplussed" and "picayune." Not sure if this was a misstep on the author's behalf or if it alluded to some background about Honey the reader is not privy to. Either way, this had an affect on the way I felt about her. At times, Honey came off to me like a bad pity party, and so I didn't really have much sympathy for her in the long run. But I don't need a sympathetic protagonist, so even with that, it didn't affect my enjoyment of the story any; although, I did have the plotline figured out about mid-way through: The crooked land developer/equally crooked cops paradigm is a staple for TV crime dramas. That said, I liked Honey, so I kept reading.

Now Honey isn't all a-hole and elbows, underneath her soiled persona is a quirky soul -- almost child-like in her anger -- who truly has genuine concern for the dregs she considers her kindred spirits, Billy in particular, who is sort of the skid-row rainman of poetry. But Billy is blissfully unaware of his lot in life and contents himself by spewing forth at full volume an endless stream of seemingly random rhymes. His innocence and his utter lack of awareness are irresistible comforts for Honey, so much so, she believes she actually feels romantic love for him in some twisted far off fairy-land sort of way. It's a love she can escape into, and Billy can be whatever she needs him to be. It's fantasy of course, and Honey understands and admits her need for it. She knows nothing will ever come of it and never deludes herself about it. The fantasy is a respite, and it's a hell of site better to be addicted to love -- even fake love -- than addicted to drugs or booze or sex. Shame really, because reality has a way of crashing even the most well-intentioned party. Honey's loosely threaded existence begins to unravel when she finds Billy wired for sound and shot down on the street.

Unable to accept the death of her only friend, Honey launches her own badly thought out and badly executed pseudo-investigation into Billy's death and a series of other peculiar incidents happening in her beloved neighborhood. The crack-addicts are multiplying and getting more aggressive by the day, the cops' efforts seem deliberately ineffectual, and the tape she confiscated from Billy's blood-soaked body makes no sense at all. Seems as if Honey finally found something in her life worth fighting for.

In her feebly justified quest for vigilante reparation, Honey encounters all manner of resistance: from her neighbors, from the crack-heads, from the drug dealers, from the land developer, and from the cops. No one, including Honey, is what they appear to be, and despite her heightened sense of awareness of this fact, Honey makes some really, really, bad decisions, but once an addict always an addict, right? She has an invincibility complex, and that, coupled with the vengeance and the bad reasoning skills, puts Honey in a dangerously precarious position. Good thing she stumbles face-first into Skinner: an idealistic cop, an all around old dogma and old religion family sort of guy, who still believes in right and wrong. Skinner has his own issues, even if he isn't aware of them until the end, so he and Honey don't really form any sort of partnership as one might expect: most of the time, Skinner has no idea where Honey is or what she is doing at any given moment. They just wind up muddled up together in the same mess because they each feel a misguided need to save the other from their particular delusions.

Honey, as predicted, makes a rather speedy no holds barred flailing descent back into the drug scene. Her rather shabby notions of righteousness fail her almost instantaneously, and her world becomes a hedonistic nightmare replete with opiate delirium, back alley sex trade, degradation, grand epiphanies, and sodomy. The cast of villainous characters is pretty stock and trade, and they play their parts to perfection, each a dualistic balancing act that sends Honey almost over the edge.

The plotting and the characters in this story are basically archetypes of the hard-boiled detective fiction genre, so expect a certain amount of familiarity. The psychology is deep and dark much like you will find with Chandler's Phillip Marlow, and you can see a bit of him in the character of Honey. As for the rest of the story, well, let's just say that if Mickey Spillane took a hit of crack and met Burroughs in a back alley this is what you would get. A heck of a ride, but not for general audiences: the psychodrama part of the story is rather disturbing, with language and imagery to match.

As for the technical stuff, the editing was quite clean and the proofreading was way above par. I noticed only a few editorial issues. I like starting out the year with a stellar read. This one had everything I wanted: it's short, so you get just what you need without being bludgeoned by character motivations or overindulgent scenery; the story itself is dark and deeply psychotic; the writing is raw, and the narrator is as pleasant as salt in a wound. Ms. Kozek definitely has a talent for writing in this genre, and I think she will do well if she can move beyond the archetypal characters and TV plot-line. If you are looking for a frail wounded bird waiting for her cop in shining armor to whisk in and save the day all manly and chivalrous like, you won't find it here. If you are looking for pulp in an angry pair of stilettos, then you will love this book.

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.

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.

Thankfully, Honey McGuinness will return in Bonnie Kozek's Just Before Dawn (2009) and The Story of Why (2010).

THRESHOLD: A Hard-boiled Thriller

Kozek doesn't mince words or waste space. She loads you into a fast moving locomotive, drops you off in a dark and dirty place, and manages to bring you out with just a few nasty stains. This is noir-plus. There are unexpected moments when the author pushes beyond the genre into literature, brilliantly manipulating the classic monosyllabic language. The result is raw, unsettling, perverse, and totally irresistible. I sat down to read it and didn't get up till I was finished. I've got a message for the author: Give me more.

If you want a second opinion, read the following review of "Threshold" by Ron Fortier published on Pulp Fiction Review:

What are the odds I'd end up reviewing two books back to back whose protagonist is named Honey? Which is exactly what happened, but be warned, these ladies are about as different as night and day can be. Read on, MacDuff.

This book kicked me in the teeth. It's an ugly slice of life few of us ever get to see, or want to for that matter. Which is why turning its pages was like sparring with a heavyweight. Every few scenes your get you jaw rocked and your gut punched. It hurts like hell, but once the literary adrenalin starts juicing, there's no way you are going to stop. Of course the challenge here is to try and tell you what Bonnie Kozek writes like, when it's damn near impossible. She's an original. Imagine what kind of hard boiled fiction Mickey Spillane would have given us if he'd been a she? A sassy, angry, tough, twenty-first century dame with a story to tell. That's Ms.Kozek.

Honey McGuinness grew up with a suicidal mother who wanted to share eternity with her. Only problem is, mom didn't want to wait until nature ran its course and opted to punch both their tickets by taking a flying leap off a high-rise. She died, Honey lived. If you call the messed up life she endured from that point on was living. Sex, drugs and a little rock and roll, the girl walked on the wild side until it all became home, one she has no intentions of ever leaving.

"...what was I afraid of? I'd ingested, digested, shoved up my ass, and shot into my bloodstream every kind of consciousness-numbing intoxicant, narcotic, and medication known to man-and whatever I missed in my later years my sick-o mother shoved down my throat in the first sixteen. I was experienced, stoned and beautiful."

When one of Honey's homeless friends is gunned down in front of her apartment and left to bleed to death, her bleak, comfy world is shattered. Especially when she finds Billy was wired and the machine tape is still on his body. Was he a helpless pawn of the cops? A patsy sent into the drug flooded streets to be sacrificed to the scum? Honey believed her heart had turned to stone long ago but with Billy's murder, she realizes, much to her own utter disbelief, that she gives a damn. Then she finds an unlikely ally in a goody-two-shoes rookie cop named Skinner. All of which propels Honey on yet another personal voyage through hell to uncover a truth too many powerful people want hidden permanently.

THRESHOLD is a brutal, take-no-prisoners adult thriller that paints a disturbing, factual picture of a culture most Americans will never know. Thank God for that. Whereas the fact that people do live like this is a crime against all mankind. Bravo to Bonnie Kozek for having the guts write about it. My only question is, why was this book published by a small, unknown publisher? If any book deserved to be a Hard Case Crime title, it's this one. They just don't come any meaner.

Enough said?