Michael Allen Dymmoch, The Cymry Ring

The Cymry Ring

Michael Allen Dymmoch

Five Star, Mar 2006, $26.95, 321 pp.

ISBN: 159414429X

Fifty-five year 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 storyline 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, and they are easy to understand so readers empathize with their plight. This is a special tale told by a master storyteller.