Dragonard himself did not know what to believe when he was kidnapped from a prison planet and tuned loose as a human weapon to be plunged to the heart of a cosmic mystery"
Our hero Dragonard is a disgraced Regulator - law enforcement, basically - infamous for his habit of occasionally slipping into a berserker rage and beating criminals into a bloody and extremely dead puddle. His bosses were perfectly OK with this until he did it to somebody important And that's why he starts the book joining an escape attempt from a Prison Planet.
Mid attempt, Dragonard is hauled off by his former Regulator boss and offered a chance to redeem himself. The Star Kings, supposedly immortal, have been dying suddenly. Find out why and Dragonard gets a pardon.
It gets a bit more complicated than that, and our violent, but still likeable, hero ends up on a wild frontier world in search of answers. Along the way he encounters beautiful women, a homicidal former acquaintance and an earth-shattering revelation.
I love finding stuff like this. "When The Star Kings Die" is the sort of space-adventure that seems to be out of fashion these days. Is it great literature? Not really. I wouldn't even call it "classic Sci-fi". But I have been a fan of Jakes's fantasy stuff since I was a kid because while he isn't a polished wordsmith, he does know how to tell a fun story. That's what this is. Old school, fun, space adventure that doesn't try to be profound, and throws in enough action and twists to keep it interesting.
Worth reading if you like this sort of thing.
Just a final note; at no point in the story does anything remotely resembling the cover happen. Not even ymbolically.
