The Viridian Convict

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*

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.

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.

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