When it comes to plot, sometimes less is more. This is certainly the case with The Lure of Song and Magic, which is bogged down by a convoluted storyline that in the end, didn’t make much sense.

Dylan “Oz” Oswin is a fabulously successful Hollywood producer with a tragic personal life: first, his wife runs away with their son, and then she dies in a car crash; then, after recovering his son, the son is kidnapped. Several years later, Donal is still missing without any clues, any sighting of the nanny who took him. Until, however, Oz receives mysterious anonymous text messages from someone named “the Librarian,” who points him in the direction of an infamous teen singer.

Syrene was a child prodigy of the first order, a girl with the voice of an angel that could make grown men weep. However, when her husband dies in a horrific car crash when she was just eighteen, she has a very public meltdown, and then disappears. She has reincarnated herself into Phillipa James, a reclusive but popular children’s book author. When Oz comes to her small desert town, the first to have linked the author with the legendary singer, he threatens to expose her privacy that is so vital to her. What Oz doesn’t understand is that Pippa’s Voice is dangerous. She has developed a thin sheen of control over it, but as she says, she could kill people with her Voice. However, according to the Librarian, her Voice is the key to bringing Donal home to his father, and they are both linked through a conspiracy to bring down ultra-talented Malcolms, a family line to which both Oz and Pippa belong.

If this summary doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to you, you’re not alone. It took me a good 150-pages to figure out what was going on, what the nature of Pippa’s Voice is, how a song could possibly bring a kidnapping victim home, and how the Librarian plays into it all. It’s a somewhat convoluted story, one that appears to be connected to others, but it’s unclear how other books are connected other than through the mysterious Librarian. The plot does come together as the story goes along, but the only reason I made it that far into the book was because of my commitment to read it as a reviewer.

Pippa is an interesting character. She is naturally passionate and expressive, but because of her guilt and self-blame for her husband’s death, she must control herself. While I initially thought that the author didn’t do this characterization justice, I think it is subtler than I originally thought. Pippa is still feisty and expressive, but in different ways than she wants to be. She throws people into the pool, and paints her face like a clown (something a children’s author can get away with while entertaining children). Unfortunately, Oz’ level of characterization doesn’t measure up to Pippa’s, and as a whole, I found their relationship lacking believability and true development. I felt the author devoted too much time to the paranormal plotlines, and not enough to the romance. It was there, for certain, but there were holes.

I think the main flaw in this book comes from the complexity of the plot. This is not to say that complex plots are a problem, but that this one was more complicated than it needed to be. As a result, I was confused and too much page time was devoted to explaining computer hacking and the Malcolm family history, instead of on a romance and more streamlined plot that had a lot of potential.