Boyle's story lines are inventive, but his characters often feel implausible and feeble, drained of vitality by the surgeries necessary to fit them into procrustean plot contraptions.
For United, the greater issue might actually be returning to the days when it would have felt implausible that their best player was their goalkeeper.
In recent stories, however, there has been a more pronounced tendency on Ms. Munro's part deliberately to stage-manage her people's fates, resulting not only in more conventionally suspenseful narratives but also in tales that can feel implausible and contrived.
Nevertheless, my character from the suburbs of Chicago who cares about the chemicals in her food in the '80s felt implausible enough to the agent I mentioned earlier to render the entire character unbelievable.
Faith's initial obliviousness to prejudice makes the first half of the book feel implausible; but, once the narrative moves to Jamaica, Levy's remarkable ability to weave a complex, engrossing family history takes over.
In 2013, the Bank's Governor, Mark Carney, compared the output of the agency unfavourably with that of the Canadian statistics agency, singling out the ONS statistics on business investment, which he felt were implausible.
When she was talking about living in a basement, eating pasta and tuna fish, struggling to raise kids while her husband went to business school and law school (the fact that both were Harvard passed unmentioned), the speech felt forced, implausible and untrue to who the Romneys really are.
It might feel slightly implausible now, at a time when Ryan Giggs seems to be drifting to the edges of the game, but if it had gone to a poll last season among Manchester United players about who they wanted to replace Louis van Gaal, a manager they found both bewildering and impenetrable, the majority of votes would not actually have been for José Mourinho.
I feel an implausible fury, then thirst, my teeth bared, my neck as taut as piano wire.
