A hard to find title with a cover by the great Jeff Jones. From the blurb this sounds like it might be terrible... but I enjoyed it. This got me to try other books by Jakes, and I formed the opinion that he is a decent mid-list author. He has written more than a dozen SF/F books in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Then he became a bestselling author of non-SF with his "Bicentennial" series in the mid-Seventies.