I found The Lesser Devil to be an entertaining novella, and the plot and battle scenes were engaging. Crispin’s character arc was also pretty good, but I felt like there were some clichés such as the

big battle speech

which sees the character come into his own. Apart from that though, it was really cool to see

Kyra

make a return and it was also nice to see how Crispin talked about Hadrian. The Catholic stuff was alright, I guess. I didn’t really care for it. The final act

on the ship

was epic, though.

So yeah, that’s about it I guess. This wasn’t at the level of the main Sun Eater series, and the prose was noticeably less flowery, but I think that it was still quality and definitely worth a read.