FROM THE PUBLISHER

"New York Times" bestselling authors L. Ron Hubbard ("Battlefield Earth") and Kevin J. Anderson ("The X-Files" and "Star Wars" series) have combined forces to deliver an action-packed espionage adventure that takes readers through the world of spies and double agents.

SYNOPSIS

"New York Times" bestselling authors L. Ron Hubbard ("Battlefield Earth") and Kevin J. Anderson ("The X-Files" and "Star Wars" series) have combined forces to deliver an action-packed espionage adventure that takes readers through the world of spies and double agents.It's been said that somewhere in the world each of us has an exact double. While that's very likely to be true, it's quite unlikely that your own, personal dead ringer will ever turn into the excitingly dangerous vividly funny problem it becomes for U.S. Navy Lt. Tom Smith when he discovers in this fast moving, action crammed espionage adventure that his exact look-alike is a notorious South American revolutionary and spy, Pedrito Miraflores.

Based on an original story by L. Ron Hubbard, his first new fiction work since his runaway 'New York Times' bestsellers "Battlefield Earth" and the 'Mission Earth' series a decade ago, and novelized by bestselling X-Files author Kevin J. Anderson, "Ai! Pedrito!: When Intelligence Goes Wrong" follows the irrepressible Pedrito when he heads north from his native Colodor to assume Smith's identity, leaving behind a crowd of both ardent admirers and vengeful foes.

The straightlaced Smith, meanwhile, unwittingly inherits both factions when he arrives in Colodor (don't look it up on a map of South America, though: Colodor's map makers have been on strike for years) for what he's been misled into believing will be a quiet, all-expenses paid vacation only to find himself attacked in a surprise set up, hilariously orchestrated by rival intelligence agencies.

As the intrigue builds and the plot and complications unfold, Hubbard and Anderson take Pedrito, Lt. Smith and the reader on a rollicking, unpredictably explosive journey through the world of spies and double agents, lovers and enemies.

Inspired by a series of real incidents in the life of L. Ron Hubbard, "Ai! Pedrito!" is a fun-to-read, richly entertaining novel of what can sometimes happen when intelligence goes wrong.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

An original story by Hubbard ("Battlefield Earth"), who's deceased, has been expanded into a novel by Anderson (several X-Files novels), with mixed results. The original story, according to Sherman's foreword, is based on Hubbard's involvement in U.S. intelligence operations, particularly in Latin America. Pedrito Miraflores, a swashbuckling Che Guevara type, is the exact physical double for painfully straight (and excruciatingly bored) U.S. Navy lieutenant Tom Smith. A Russian-Cuban plot leads to their switching places, whereupon they proceed to make love to each other's girlfriends, alternately sabotage and uphold each other's causes, and join forces against the CIA and the FBI. Parts of this book are just as zanily satiric as Hubbard's celebrated lampoon of pulp writing, "Typewriter in the Sky", and, as you'd expect from both Hubbard and Anderson, the pacing is brisk and the action plentiful. The central conceit wobbles under the load of a full novel, however, and too often the satire slides into silliness or relies on gender and ethnic stereotypes. Even so, fans of nonstop, slightly goofy SF should enjoy this one.

AudioFile - Yuri Rasovsky

Before inventing Scientology, the late L. Ron Hubbard was known primarily as a writer of science fiction. This title is a screenplay that Kevin Anderson has novelized. It's not sci-fi, but a hilarious spoof of spy thrillers given a multi-cast treatment augmented by some music and sound effects. The actors have a good time with the material, but the text is wittier than they are. Y.R. ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Before his self-glorification as the founder of Scientology, Hubbard was an inhumanly prolific pulp-fiction hack. This time, his original story is turned into a novel by Anderson (three X-Files novels and "Ignition", 1997, with Doug Beason). Hubbard insists that the tale is based on real incidents that sprang alive in his memory during the time he wrote "Battlefield Earth" (1982)—yet this somewhat comedic mistaken-identity novel also describes the shallow loyalities and convoluted worlds of American and Russian intelligence after the fall of the Soviet empire. When Russian and Cuban intelligence in Cuba notes that Lt. Tom Smith, of the USN Missile Security Section of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Pedrito Miraflores, the notoriously mad but faithful Communist revolutionary leader, are exact doubles for each other, a plan is put into motion for switching their identities, with Tom Smith taking the fall for Pedrito's misdeeds south of the border and Pedrito assuming Smith's place in naval intelligence. Is this the greatest intelligence coup of the century? Well, not when'as the subtitle warns—intelligence goes wrong. The obligatory face-out scene comes when Smith and Miraflores are locked up together in a Cuban cell and one of them—the "real" Pedrito Miraflores—must be sent to Havana to be shot as a traitor. Dreadful preadolescent plotting in comic-strip prose.