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Book review --
Martian Knightlife, by James P. Hogan
 Kieran Thane is a future version of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack character. Well, sort of -- Thane doesn't jealously guard his anonymity in the same manner that Jack does -- he has a bank account (more than one?), considers buying property on Mars under his real name, and uses aliases that are evocative of his name -- "Kennilworth Thoon" and "the Khal of Tadjikistan," for example.
That aside, Thane is a fix-it guy in the same manner as Jack, just not nearly as violent as Jack is. He puts the bad guys in their places and gets a nice paycheck out of the deal, as well as getting something for the victims that he's working for. In the first part of the book, the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, for the most part -- sort of. They're actually two separate copies of the same person. More for those who buy the book (Amazon link above!). Also involved are some organized-crime types who offer the perpetrator version a quarter-billion in international dollars in exchange for getting first crack at the new technology involved. Thane runs a counter-scam on the perpetrator and his mob buddies, which leads into the second part.
In the second part of the book, Thane has a two-front battle -- first, the mobsters come looking for whoever ran off with their 250 million, and they're not afraid to hurt people in getting their cash back. The other aspect of this is that some friends of Thane's are running an archaeological dig, only to find that an interplanetary corporation (Zorken Construction) has first claim on the site. Zorken intends to start mining asoon as possible, and they're willing to hire private military contractors to run off the dig team. Thane manages to scare Zorken's chairman into giving up claims on the dig site, while running off the mobsters, and he goes back to hanging out with his girlfriend (June) and his dog (Guiness).
The archaeological dig is on a site built by the long-lost "Technolithic" civilization, alleged to have built the Egyptian pyramids (North Africa) and Macchu Pichu in the Andes (South America), among other ancient, large structures Hogan opines that there's no way that people of the Egyptian dynasties could have built the pyramids, or people at the same level of technology as the Incas could have built Macchu Pichu.
Hogan is well-known for questioning the scientific world's Conventional Wisdom -- he uses the novel Cradle of Saturn and its sequel, The Anguished Dawn cite the works of psychiatrist and armchair-astrophysict Immanuel Velikovsky, and The Legend that was Earth cites electric-cosmos.org as a source of inspiration.
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