Loved this futuristic action/adventure! Sam York is Sabrina York and I adore the heart she reveals in her stories so I took a chance from NetGalley. I'm so glad I did! She didn't disappoint.

I didn't find the writing appealing, short and rapid phrases, I didn't like that there were lots of unexplained species, different planet names just thrown in the mix, plus a ton of different appelations: consider Jimmy who is a kind of geekho = dink = nard?? And lots of slang/terminology, that I'm not even sure if I got right: huff = draw = chud = possibly weed? Diddly = ? db = dead body, tanging = fucking? Also, the author sure loves abbreviations/acronyms: C.O.W. = casualties of war, CR = conference room, HP = home planet, PTB = Powers That Be. Annoying!!

There was a lot more romance (or lust?) than I was expecting and, even if this was fast-paced, full of action, noir humor and mystery, it wasn’t quite my cup of coffee, so I won’t read the next in the series.

Viridian Convict by Sam York is one sci-fin you won’t forget! It is very fast paced and once you understand the lingo it really comes together. Hint use the glossary it is a must. It takes you on an adventure! I am voluntarily leaving my honest review after reading this arc.

With an introduction to this novel being a mixture of 'The Godfather' and 'The Guardians of the Galaxy', you bet that my opinion of this book is sailing through the ceiling. It's following Buzz Lightening's advice and going 'To infinity, and BEYOND!'. You bet your sweet potatoes it is!
So, did this book match my super unrealistic expectations? That's the real question.
Sort of. It did, and it didn't, but that's not the books fault. I admit that I'm not a huge Sci-Fi fan. I'm more of Fantasy enthusiast, but I love giving all and any genre a go.
So, what did I like?
This was Sam York's debut fictitious novel and I believe he did an exceptional job. You could tell that the novel was his first, it had that new writer feel to it. I'm not sure how to explain, the writing seemed a little fresh. I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well, but that's what I'm sticking to. It was a huge adventure and I actually loved the plot. It was fun and exiting and that characters kept my attention. I definitely enjoyed this novel, without a doubt. However, it had a rather slow start.
I'm someone that believes that the start of the book is usually the worst part, and I know that's a strange thing to say but bear with me. The beginning of a book is usually the part where the author tries to introduce the characters and set up the plot, but sometimes it can be incredibly boring and drag on. That's because you just don't care about any of that yet, and that's not the author's fault. Not at all. It's just how readers are.
I found that this novel had that attitude, it dragged a little bit. I have a saying, if you aren't interested by 100 pages, then you should probably put down the book and move on. That's sometimes the worse advice to follow. It took me 180 pages to begin enjoying Magician by Raymond E. Feist and it's a wonderful novel. There's always an exception, and this book is an exception. Absolutely incredible!

Stuff happened. There was action, there was love, there was cool space stuff and alien babies. Stuff just seemed to happen. No rules, no plot, just stuff happening left and right. I was so lost and there were so many people double crossing each other. It was crazy. Too crazy for my likes. The made up language drove me nuts. I think that confused me even more.

If you like western space odysseys and don't mind made up languages and double agents galore this is for you.

Side note: This felt like a fanfiction or not polished story. I feel like it could be so much better with a little more meat to it. The idea itself was great. I actually did enjoy it. It took me forever to get into it but halfway through I couldn't stop reading. It just needed more direction.

This was one wild ride! Set in a crazy intergalactic world on the prison planet, Viridian, I was introduced to one of the most intricate alien worlds I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Fair warning. Things on Viridian are very…unique. There are several alien species vying for attention and it is a little overwhelming to keep it all straight. It took me a a chapter or two to really settle in and understand, but there was next to no time to get complacent because the action jumped off immediately!

I really enjoyed The Viridian Convict by Sam York I found it was just so different and a very unique concept.
What initially appealed to me here was the idea of a prison planet colony sort of like an alien version of Kurt Russel's Escape from New York.
I just wasn't expecting to like it quite as much as I did.
And once I got used to all the various terminology being bandied about here, I very quickly became immersed in all the colourful narrative used throughout.
This also contained a lot more romance than I was expecting, which was again fab for me as I'm a sucker for a bit of the old love dust.
"The Viridian Convict was fast and furious from the get-go and I adored all the many diverse characters portrayed here.
Tig, Angel, Granny and Tig's stinky partner one-eye, loved them all in various ways.
This was in a way rather slapstick at times but it worked and I found myself chuckling to myself throughout.
My only slight criticism here was the types of aliens contained on the prison planet all seemed to be variations of earth animals like the cluckers and the rats.
I would have prefered maybe a more imaginative approach to the alien form.
But this is only a minor gripe from me and I still enjoyed this story very much.
I was refreshingly different and I am happy to recommend this.
So I was provided with an ARC of "The Viridian Convict" By Netgalley of which I have reviewed voluntary.
All opinions expressed are entirely my own.

Tig works as a muni on the prison planet of Viridian. Munis are enforcers of a sort for Granny who is the crime lord of the world. Tig happens to be the only human on the planet. He was a cop on Earth and framed when the planet was annexed by the Fed - short for Federation. Sentenced to the prison planet, he first became a drug addict. Now he is clean but torn between working for Granny and working for Mia who is a Fed who has something on him. Generally he has convinced himself not to care about things because he has no control over his life.

When he is tasked with picking up a package and bringing it to Granny, Mia interferes and orders him to bring the package to the Sisterhood. Tig picks up the package which turns out to be a lovely girl but he isn't the only one who wants her and she isn't okay with being anyone's package.

Tig finds and loses the girl he calls Angel a few times. Rumor has it that she has a package that will make anyone who controls her rich. The Swans, also known as the Cluckers, capture her a couple of times. It also seems that whenever Tig does manage to catch up with her, his enemies aren't far behind and his private informants and his few friends are killed whenever he calls on them for help.

This was a twisty science fiction story where everyone except Tig have bunches of hidden motives for their actions. He isn't quite TSTL -Too Stupid to Live - but he seems a little clueless and too trusting for someone who has survived ten years on a very hostile planet.

The story was fast-paced and reminded me a bit of a noir mystery. Tig is the same sort of character as the detectives in those stories - hard-boiled, tough, graphic vocabulary, and unsentimental but a sucker for a beautiful woman. I'll be eager to see where this series goes next.

Really wanted to love this, but I just could not get into it. I attempted it several times, but I just couldn't get into it.
Rating only added because Netgalley requires a star rating.

Loved this futuristic action/adventure! Sam York is Sabrina York and I adore the heart she reveals in her stories so I took a chance from NetGalley. I'm so glad I did! She didn't disappoint.

This took a chapter or so to get into because this is a whole very unfamiliar world to understand. I bookmarked the glossary and used it a lot in the beginning until I got into the flow. This book was so much fun. The "hero is a clueless human former cop good-guy who is imprisoned on a hostile planet inhabited by cons from all over the universe. He did the right thing, refused to obey an order that violated his morals and was exiled for it. He is so a fish out of water on this planet but manages to land on his feet. He stumbles from one adventure to the next somehow managing to coming out ahead. The story is full of snark and I smiled the whole way through it. I've never seen Guardians of the Galaxy but it made me think of the old Sam Spade detective movies. It also has major surprises springing at you all over the place.

Just awesome job Sam/Sabrina and thank you so much North Star for taking a chance on me for my honest review.

Imagine, dear reader, a moon delegated for the worst of the worst convicts across the Federation. A penal colony of aliens with no rules other than every being for themselves. Welcome to Viridian. An alien eat alien world where the cast of characters is a mob boss named Granny, a human smart mouth named Tig, his curvaceous kick ass wanna be love interest Angel, and his partner One Eye. If you grew up watching Kurt Russell play Snake in the John Carpenter movies Escape from New York/LA, then you are gonna LOVE this book! I devoured it and did not want it to end! Highly recommend and look forward to reading more from author Sam York!

*Received ARC from NetGalley for review*

Not totally for me. There's a ton to focus on which makes it hard to focus on anything. I love my sci-fi, but this was too much. This is the kind of read you need to be able to devote some time to so that it can be properly appreciated. I'm adding it to my reread shelf because I think I could really enjoy this if I have a slow week.

Tig is a muni, a cop in a force run by Granny, the ferocious criminal who runs this sector of Viridian prison moon. But really, Tig would rather be one of Granny's henchmen than be out on his own. Puny humans, of which Tig is the only sample here, are not well equipped to take on the incarcerated criminals, most of whom are toothy and sharp clawed.

But even Tig is daunted when Granny orders him to run an impossible errand: Snatch a Novice who has just arrived at the spaceport and bring her back to Granny before she can get to the Sisterhood compound. If that weren't difficult enough, up pops Mia of the Fed (short for Federation perhaps, but basically the interplanetary cops) who demands that Tig deliver the Novice straight to the Sisterhood. The Novice, who is very well endowed physically, for a nun, has her own ideas about where she wants to go and with whom.

This is an enjoyable space romp with lots of silly dialogue; a sort of "What would it be like to be a cop in Mos Eisley?"

I received a review copy of "The Viridian Convict" by Sam York (North Star Editions) through NetGalley.com.

Too nonsense for my taste, the science-fiction seems more an after-thought than the real stuff. You know like building a working society

The Viridian Conflict is the first book by Sam York so I wasn't sure what to expect. What I found was a different SciFi story than I had been expecting. ?This book is a standalone. There is violence and sex.

The book blurb adequately describes the storyline so I'm not going to repeat that all of that info here. It took a few chapters to figure out what this story was about. The characters were quite varied. One unusual aspect of the alien races was that they seemed based on earth species such as chickens, rats, frogs, etc. There were some surprising twists and turns. I ended up liking the book more than I thought I would.

Thank you to NetGalley, North Star Editions, and Sam York for the opportunity to read and review "The Viridian Convict"!

Welcome to Viridian; home to other people's problems. Problems, that is, in the form of convicts dumped on this inescapable remote moon by the Fed, the species governing the known universe and not-so-secret evil empire. Enter our hero Tig, the only human in the whole place, and quasi-cop/enforcer for the biggest crime boss on Viridian. His skills as a "muni" are only outdone (and often undone) by his totally out of control libido.

The story starts in the midst of his humdrum existence working as what passes for a police officer among the entirely convict population of Viridian. He's at home in this profession having formerly been a cop on Earth before ending up in this celestial slammer. From here we meet a plethora of characters and species that would easily find themselves at home in the Mos Eisley cantina. The various factions and species are all interesting and left me wanting to know more. While this is a start to a trilogy that I can't wait to read more of, the author Sam York could probably write a hundred stories of just the various goings-on of the various inhabitants of this desolate rock.

Soon our hero gets tasked to retrieve a package; one that turns out to be the living, breathing, personification of Tig's every desire. Through a series of misadventures and with the help of other shady but ultimately valiant characters, the pair travel through Viridian on a quest that will change everything.

This book was really enjoyable. It kept up a fun, fast pace throughout while still allowing for a bit of character development and relationship building between several characters. The one constant as the story unfolds is that nothing on Viridian is truly as it seems. Some of the twists and turns are predictable, but not in a bad way. They are presented to the reader in a fairly obvious manner, but often leave Tig, not the sharpest of tools in the shed, scrambling to catch up. It seems Tig is the last to know about just about anything in this story, which lends itself to the humor throughout. While many characters in this role often heroically push the events forward with wit, charm and no small amount of luck, Tig is often found flying by the seat of his pants, and more than occasionally by something else in his pants.

Which brings me to the part of this story I genuinely wasn't expecting. Tig is a through and through philanderer, completely obsessed with and often impetuously distracted by T&A. Nary do several pages go by without his taking a break to observe in great detail the naughty bits of what passes for the female versions of many a species on Viridian. We also find out he's had casual affairs with most of them. If he's not scoping out "DC" members of the opposite sex, it's because he's busy taking stock of the situation in his own nether regions which seem to share the same action-packed twists and turns as the rest of the story. This is a man that does not need performance enhancing drugs and he lets you know about it constantly.

This stream of sexual consciousness delivered throughout from Tig's entirely first-person perspective really caught me off guard at first, as I haven't come across many books in this genre that so often forget what's going on in the story to describe the heavenly view of some girl's butt or boobs. Particularly because those terms in all their adolescent glory leave you feeling at times like the book was written by a puberty-fueled teenage boy, fantasizing his perfect alternate sci-fi reality. This was made all the better when I got to the "About the Author" page at the end of the book and found out that Sam York is actually Sabrina York, a frequent writer of "Steamy, Snarky Romance". This little discovery was the perfect gem to find after the rollercoaster that was The Viridian Convict.

I did have a few issues with the book, though they are mostly easy to overlook and don't really get in the way of the story. Just nit-picky things that I wondered about, almost all of them related to what things were called. For example, why on this 99.9% alien place half the creatures are named after earthly tropes. The largest offender of which are the bird-like characters known as cluckers, hens and roosters, who live in Chickentown. There are numerous creatures we come across compared to and named after some earth-based animal or another, be they "Ravens" or "Billygoats" or "Ursas" or "Rats". It just seemed weird seeing as Earth is a very new "acquisition" of the Feds (another earthly term), that so many of these species would end up with Earth given names. I could see this being the case if Earthlings *were* the Feds running everything, or if the population of Viridian featured many "Humes" instead of just the one. I think the most on the nose example is probably Tig's "Angel" a member of the Seraph race whose real name, which I won't spoil here, is also not what you could consider to be a huge departure from that theme.

But again, this kind of ties in to the humor, and is easy to get over. I just wish that the author had continued with some of the other very creative race names they gave to other creatures and had instead put more time into describing them in detail we discover to be familiar rather than the eponymous use of words we know to stir the idea of what they look and act like.

Overall, The Viridian Convict is a really fun romp, and a pretty different take on similar books in the genre. I found it very enjoyable and am looking forward to what comes next for Tig and friends. It feels like the universe created in this first book can really expand in many different directions and I can't wait to see where they go.

#TheViridianConvict #NetGalley