The Heretic–Lucas Bale

I picked up this while looking for something to read on Kindle Unlimited and browsing on the Kindle is a pretty annoying experience so I tend to look for something which has a decent number of reviews and looks like it might be reasonably written.
So when I first saw this book I was a bit wary as there’s a lot of positive statements from people I don’t know and authors of books I haven’t read or heard of, then there was the fact that it was clearly making a plus point that this was a very Firefly inspired book. But, as I said I was browsing on the Kindle and wanted something to read there and then.
Yes, this is a formulaic scifi adventure book. Yes, it has rather shamelessly been influenced by Firefly to the point where you expect to see references or characters moved outright from one universe to another. These are not good reasons to not read it though, as this was actually a very good read.
Things I liked about the book

1. The references to key things in the universe which weren’t expanded upon in this book made me feel the author had enough ideas to turn this into a series
2. The way the weather was used to make simple challenges harder and allowed more space for characters to struggle in without having to rope in hordes of soldiers or some magic technology
3. The pacing. At no point do you either feel that there’s nothing happening or that so much is happening you can’t track what’s happening

There are some points I’m not so sure about such as the spaceship having so much of a personality that it’s in danger of becoming a character (I don’t really like non-AI machines being anthropomorphised) and the rather clunky symbolism in the character names.
I think this can really be summed up with this.
I read this book over the course of two evenings and immediately downloaded the sequel.
That’s a pretty solid sign that I enjoyed it and want to read more in the series.
The Heretic (Beyond the Wall Book 1)