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We're back to the road trip, everyone. While I think Paladin's Faith corrected some of the mistakes of the series' second Paladin's Strength by making the party much smaller and consequently actually allowing us to learn something about them - except I did not actually enjoy the dynamic of the quartet very much - I am not sure it managed to improve over that second instalment. And certainly it lost most of the momentum and humour of the third.
Paladin's Faith starts out as something more akin to a spy story, where our main goal should be to save an artificer from a merchant-spy organisation at a court of nobility. I actually enjoyed this idea - the paladins and our lead Shane are way out of their depth once it comes only to socialising, intrigue, information and bitching around, and I think placing Wren and Shane in their respective roles as 'small noble' and 'brooding bodyguard' was a very interesting premise. Marguerite, the spy we know from (still the best of the series, now very very closely followed by part three) Paladin's Grace, is the only one truly in her element there. We even had the seeds for interesting moral and ethical questions, and something that could have become a very interesting point of contestion between the two romantic leads, the incredibly moral and honest paladin Shane and the significantly more pragmatically-moral spy Marguerite. Wren and Davith's characters, too, as well as others in the Court of Smoke (Lady Silver? Fennel? Even that horribly lecherous Lord?) could have made for an excellent and shillering cast to dive into questions of ethics and morals in a world both run by capitalist merchant's guilds as well as gods and their black/white morality paladins. The potential. Gold.
Except, what do we do? About halfway through we abandon the Court Arc of the story, move to the Quartet on a Hike arc (I really disliked that one and its dynamic, I admit), then move from the Demon Cult to the Demon Slayer Arc (pun intended), and close the story. What I mean to say by using the otherwise more anime-adjacent term of an "arc" to describe the coherent overarching plot of one part of the story, is to say that I believe that the narrative jumps around too much in a way that makes the novel appear somewhat like several stories glued together. That the artificer who was a central goal of the first arc just suddenly disappeared did not even feel out of character for the narrative when it happened; the fact that at the very end, some dialogue tries to stick the pieces of several arcs together to make it seem as if it was 'all coming together' only served to give me the impression that Kingfisher also knew it was too disjointed to feel like one whole.
Concerning the relationships, I have to admit that I perhaps like Marguerite and Shane the least. Unlike actually all prior pairings, they had the amazing potential of an actual conflict of ethics and were, unlike other couples, not based primarily on physical attraction. They are opposites in character that would be extremely interesting to dive into. Except due to the nature of the story, this is implied more than developed, so that I personally feel that their romance was left empty. In fact, I ended the novel realising - to my own dismay - that I even bought the entire Istvhan/Clara romance better, purely because there we knew it was based on the whole 'they're so strong and big and are the only one who could take me in a fight (or the sheets)'. Shane/Marguerite have the makings of character, and then too little introspection into their own attraction or too little time to develop the ethical questions the novel could have been doing instead of introducing world-lore-focused arcs.
Indeed, while the Quartet on a Hike arc essentially serves to expand the map of the story only, the two Demon Slayer arcs definitely provide interesting snippets of lore about demons and gods, as well as how paladins work. I enjoyed that, and will remain curious to find out more about the world. Do I think this should have been a separate book, and this one remain at the Court? Definitely. I believe Shane is the perfect lead for the Demon Slayer plot, and the morals and honesty we saw developed match it perfectly; but if we split this book into two parts, it would have worked better. I think this is what the initial goal of Paladin's Faith was; but the pretended interrelations and the consequent forgetting of plot elements just made each part feel incomplete, and the lack of proper debates about ethics and a resolution between the two leads similarly left me with only the feeling of potential, rather than satisfaction.

Addendum 1: I just remembered, a whole novel later and we were given no follow-up to the dramatic and amazing reveal Piper did at the end of Paladin's Hope. What was it? Why are we not allowed to know? Will it actually come back or do I have to wait another 7 novels until it is Galen's turn again to find out? If there is one issue I have with the series, then it is that no novel seems to have any real consequences for the following ones except minor points like Istvhan being 'up north' now. Little hope for the Judith reveal as well now, until we get to her own instalment at least.
Addendum 2: In this sense, I am also not entirely certain why we did the Demon Arcs now rather than continue on to explore the Ancients from book three. With Shane as the lead, we naturally need the Demon arc, but then we would not have needed the Court arc, or could have combined that one with more about the Ancients and made this instalment into Wren's story (girl definitely goes Through It here anyway, she'd have deserved this too) rather than Shane's, and have him be the protagonist of book 5 focused on the two Demon Arcs.
Addendum 3: @Hirondelle, in case you read this: please let me know what the 'bit of lore' is that you mentioned being introduced at the start of Paladin's Grace that returned now, I cannot for the life of me figure it out.
Addendum 4: [re-edited after deliberation] At this point in the series, I still think the ranking goes 1<3<4<2. I am all the more appreciating the exciting action of instalment three now, especially since Paladin's Faith failed to fully grip me and 'force me' to continue reading, even when I finished on a dramatic cliffhanger chapter. Book four is evidently superior to book two though, particularly in terms of lore and the central question of the dead god as well as a better focus on introduxing characters properly.