Both books take their chops from Ian Fleming’s gritty cold war novels featuring the infamous, James Bond. But where “The Undercover Gentleman” chooses a more subdued literary take on the secret agent genre, Mike Green goes all out to deliver the maximum amount of punch per page. CIA Agent James Marshall gets called in to follow up on the death of a colleague and gets subsequently wrapped up in an overseas brawl over, what else, oil. The plot reeks of current headlines, much in the same way that the latest Bond film, “Quantum of Solace”, does. But unlike Marc Forster’s cinematic dud, Green takes special care to develop his plot around the bullets so that it isn’t perforated in the process.

This makes “Path of Thunder” a wonderful balance of action and depth, as its points are driven during the interim between explosive combat, which often trade realism for intense gut-wrenching action but with enough flair to compensate. Along James Marshal’s journey he meets some crazy characters that readers have come to expect from the old Fleming days. The honor driven Samurai Agaki throws in some much needed swordplay into the fray, and a colleague who goes by the name of Guns, well, I’ll let you guess his specialty. But these characters are introduced and treated with such dedication that they don’t feel campy, and they add a brilliant luster to the Tom Clancy- (that’s early Tom Clancy, mind you) like intricacies of the ever expansive plot.

If “Path of Thunder” has any real flaws at all they lie in its hero, James Marshall, who is likable enough but only in as much as he follows the modus operandi of your typical action hero. He has a bag full of one-liners and tosses them like hard candy at a parade, has the scar on his face that screams “I’ve seen more action than you, maggot!”, and yes, his friend was killed two months before retirement. Still, “Path of Thunder” reminds us why these things are clichéd in the first place; they’re cool as hell.