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TL;DR: 4.x? rounded down. Good, but with a lot of distracting elements.

A demon is ordered to team up with a sadistic exorcist he has history with.

This was not my best KJ Parker reading experience. While I think the story itself and the writing were fine there were several things going on here that I found very distracting.

The first is that this is billed as a sequel or related to Prosper's Demon which I read like a year and half ago. Given I have a terrible memory for characters even while actively reading the book, add Parker's penchant for unnamed first person narrators, and the fact I couldn't give you more than the vaguest gist of an idea what occurred in Prosper's Demon at this point, I spent a good chunk of this novella wondering if any of these were supposed to be the same characters (I still don't know, but maybe not?) or if indeed what I was getting here was going to be the same story as Prosper's Demon, just from the demon's POV.

On top of that, the geographical description of the major location in the story is a clear analogue for Israel, right down to the southern neighbor that mummifies cats. This is so heavy handed even my ordinarily symbolism blind self couldn't help but see it, which immediately had me wondering if there's some political statement going on that I'm not picking up on.

Now, Parker's stuff in general probably has a lot of historical analogues that I'm just too ignorant to pick up on, but the religions in his world generally have enough of a twist on them that while I can see certain parallels the heretical aspects amuse me and are enough to keep it from breaching the boundary between fiction and real world that I need to maintain immersion in the story. But the backstory here is basically Paradise Lost and I wasn't really mentally prepared for that.

Knowing the title of Parker's next novella, (scheduled for March 2022), is The Long Game and that phrase comes up near the end of this one a couple times, I'm going to assume it's related to this in a way I hadn't realize prior to reading this. So I think when that does come out and I get around to it, I really should reread Prosper's Demon and Inside Man before starting that one. So technically I should give this 5 stars since "would reread" is my criteria for that. But I'm not gonna. So :P

As a final aside, I'm still feeling a touch of disappointment at the increasing amount of actual "fantasy" in Parker's work. The first several Parker works I read were what I class as "non-magical fantasy", meaning secondary-world imaginary history, heavy on the intrigue. The occasional supernatural type stuff was ambiguous enough you could easily take a materialistic / atheistic type reading of it, which I really liked. Of course the voice is what keeps me coming back to Parker moreso than the details of the content, but non-magical fantasy always feels like it's in short supply and I'm a bit sad to see more unambiguously supernatural stuff creeping in, even if he does it very well.