Book Review: The Cymry Ring

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

The Cymry Ring     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Michael Allen Dymmoch
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Fantasy   Time Travel
Five Star, Mar 2006, $26.95, 321 pp.

Fifty-five years old English CID Detective Ian Carreg is still coming to grips over the death of his beloved wife Marjorie, who died when an out of control speeding car hit her. Though he “talks” to his Marjorie, he keeps himself busy though his two adult children Peter and Margaret worry about him.

CID sends Ian to arrest escaped felon Dr. Jemma Henderson, daughter of renowned physicist Dr. Marcus Henderson, convicted of murdering her lover. He heads to her dad’s home where he enters a shed in Cymry Henge just before an explosion occurs. He soon realizes that somehow Jemma sent both of them back seventeen centuries to Roman Britannia where they confront and then befriend three Welsh. Captured by the Roman legions, the pair with their new friends struggle to survive while trying to insure future history remains the same while trying to figure out a way to tell her father and his children they live albeit over a millennium before they were born.

THE CYMRY RING starts off like a typical police procedural tale until her father’s machine successfully sends them back seventeen hundred years and switches into a time travel thriller. The story line is action-packed especially in Roman times as the “settlers” from the twenty-first century fight to stay alive in a world so different than their birth time. Ian and Jemma are believable characters, easy to understand so readers empathize with their plight. This is a special tale told by a master storyteller.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner