Following up for the (no doubt) large contingent of readers out there who care about my reading adventures, I can now report I just got through Harlan Coben's thriller "Just One Look."

Not having read a mass-market paperback in a long time -- again, this is not out of snobbery, rather, leisure time management -- I will say that, while I didn't quite experience a "twitchy agony," I did feel strongly compelled to Find Out What Happens. There's an obvious formula to how Coben works: a sort of reverse-engineering style of storytelling that reveals crucial details in well-timed, tantalizing dribs and drabs. Obvious -- but highly effective. (And I understand this was not one of his better regarded books.)

However: Gawd, does Coben write clunkily! I've got no problem with the breathless three- and four-word sentences; the gone-in-a-blink chapters; the digestible newspaper-style paragraph breaks. It goes with the territory. I understand the imperative to keep the story moving; as Coben has said, he's competing with TV and DVDs and wants to force you, at all cost, to keep your easily-distracted eyeballs on his books.

What jars is the almost pathological reliance on cliches and conversational slackness ("that kind of thing"; "stuff like that"; "from the get-go," etc.). Every character, at some point, is said to have "shrugged" in reply to something or other. One guy is actually described as a "creepazoid"! Another does "the medical research" for a pharmaceutical company. Not medical research -- the medical research.

This is the rule; the exceptions were some mildly compelling passages on the angst of upper-middle-class suburban motherhood. Coben wasn't terribly original here, but I appreciated the departure from the mechanical and procedural -- and I came away with the hunch that he could do better. If he cared to try.

Coben was asked if, like "Mystic River" author Dennis Lehane, if he'd simply like more time to write as a reward for commercial success.

"No," he said, according to the Atlantic profile. "Dennis and I don't do the same thing. He's somebody who comes out with a book every two years or so." A more flexible deadline is a recipe for procrastination. "My first book was due October 1, and by spectacular coincidence, I finished it on September 30," he reportedly said.

I can certainly relate to that; I'm not asking for Henry James here. Neither do I want to rehash the purported mutual exclusivity of great plotting and great prose writing or Tom Wolfe's social realism crusade. What I want is roundly satisfying middlebrow fiction. Where do I turn? John le Carre?