Spoilers for Kathy Herman's novel "Tested By Fire".

• Mysterious people appear without seeming to have any purpose.
  • And those mysterious people are brought in and dropped without warning or reason, especially when they appear to be brought in for suspense, but fail to create any for the few sentences in which they are included.
• The wife, Rhonda, believes that her husband will love her again if she highlights and cuts her hair, goes on a diet, exercises again, and loses weight.
  • And it works.
• Pages upon pages of evangelism without a pause, especially when more than one effort is going on between two pairs of people in two different locations.
  • And the recipients are passive about this.
• The car Jed, the husband, is driving breaks down. He meets another man who offers to fix his car, except that they won't be able to get a new part soon enough because of a chemical spill, and so the other man lets Jed take his car as long as Jed drives his (cognitively impaired) son up to Portland for him.
  • This event takes place shortly after the men meet for the first time, so there's no way the other man would know to trust Jed.
• There are multiple coincidences, such as the FBI not being able to track Jed because he's driving a different car, a fugitive not being found when two agents walk around the park and somehow miss him, and other things like that.

I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I intend to do so despite its flaws. If nothing else comes of it, at least I will have seen examples of what I shouldn't do in writing my own novels.