Each of the Princes is distinct, each different, each driven by some monomania or quirk. They're all damaged men - how else would they have become Demon Princes? But the damage they do to those around them is vastly higher, and that's one reason why Gersen is killing them, one by one.
The main reason, though, is that he has to. Gersen was trained for revenge by his grandfather from immediately after the attack, and has no other purpose in life. The Demon Princes series is ostensibly about the five different mysterious figures Gersen must track down and remove, but it's really about monomania, Gersen's as much or more than that of the Princes. Gersen is as damaged a man as any of the five; he's just broken in a way that is useful to society, rather than the reverse.
Jack Vance was one of the more subtle writers of mid-century science fiction: his universes were vast and complex, his people carefully fit into those universes, each quirky and specific. The Oikumene of this era of his career is not a single thing - even his planets are rarely a single thing - and he used documents from his fictional worlds at the beginning of each chapter to extend and deepen his world, often in ways that don't even seem to relate to the action of the current novel at all.
(At this point, I should mention that the first two novels in the series were The Star King and The Killing Machine, and that all three are available in the convenient omnibus The Demon Princes, Vol. 1, which is how I read all three this time.)
This time, Gersen is seeking Viole Falushe, whose monomania manifests in sex - or so the wider universe believes. Gersen learns that Falushe was once the troubled adolescent Vogel Filschner, in a minor city on Old Earth, who kidnapped nearly an entire Choral Society (and sold them into slavery in the Beyond, starting his criminal career) in an attempt to get one girl, Jheral Tinzy, who was absent that day. Filschner and Tinzy both disappeared soon afterward, one without a trace, though Filschner has returned, here and there, mysteriously and unexpectedly as any of the Demon Princes, as Falushe.
Gersen, using the fabulous wealth he gathered in the previous book, buys the declining but prestigious Cosmopolis magazine and poses as a feature writer to investigate Falushe/Filschner, and to, eventually, get an invitation to Falushe's fabled Palace of Love, hidden somewhere in the Beyond. He does this by finding and manipulating the "mad poet" Navarth, a mentor of the young Filschner and still in touch with Falushe in the current day.
And, of course, once Gersen gets to the Palace of Love, he has to find Falushe - who hides among others as all the Demon Princes do, masking as normal human to conceal their true natures - and, in the end, remove him.
That's the plot, but The Palace of Love is a languid book, for all that it's barely a hundred and fifty pages long. It begins with Gersen in a relationship with Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay, the woman he rescued in the previous book - but his monomania drives them apart. And a young woman in this book is drawn to him as well, though he knows his need to finish his revenge will stymie any possible relationship there as well.
And, even more pointedly, the story of Falushe is very similar. He's been spending the past nearly thirty years trying to make Jheral Tinzy "love" him - in a demanding, monomaniacal, all-encompassing, impossible way - and creating facsimiles of her to keep trying and trying again.
Vance has been clear all along that Gersen is as broken as the men he chases, but Palace of Love sees that become central to the novel: Gersen and Falushe are two sides of the same coin. And, by extension, so are Gersen and all of the Princes: he had to be made like them in order to destroy them. Eventually, he'll come to the end of that string and have nothing left in his life. But, for now, there are still two Princes to go.
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