Tony Abbott. The Forbidden Stone. New York: Harper, 2014. Print. The Copernicus Legacy.

The Forbidden Stone is the first in what will be a series by children’s and young adult (YA) author Tony Abbott. And yes, it actually does have something to do with Copernicus.

Wade Kaplan’s father, Dr. Roald Kaplan, is an astrophysics professor whose German mentor has suddenly died under suspicious circumstances. The trip to the Berlin funeral is supposed to a kind of family vacation. With Dr. Kaplan are Wade, Wade’s stepbrother Darrell, a cousin Lily, and her friend Becca. They end up scrambling around Europe and then around the world.

It turns out that Dr. Vogel, the recently deceased astronomer, is a Guardian. Without them fully aware of what it meant, Dr. Vogel chose five students, one being Dr. Kaplan, to be initiated into the Guardians also.

Guardians for what? Not the Owls of Ga’Hoole, but secret custodians of relics left behind by Nicolaus Copernicus. There are twelve relics, a kind of Zodiac of relics, each apparently associated with a different constellation.

In a journal left behind by one of Copernicus’s students, they find a mathematical equation thought to have been first developed in the 1990s. It is as if someone had found E=mc² in the writings of Pythagoras. This equation is related to relativity—an equation that hypothetically could lead to time travel.

According to the notebook, if the twelve relics are assembled in a certain way, Copernicus observed that one would have a machina tempore—a time machine. The journal makes it sound like Copernicus and his student have used the time machine but decided it was too dangerous. They disassembled it and stowed these relics around the world. To discover the locations requires solving a series of unusual puzzles and knowing something of the constellations.

In The Forbidden Stone our group of kids and the astrophysicist actually discover at least three relics related to Copernicus, but only one is part of the time machine. That relic is, naturally, the forbidden stone of the title. It looks like there will be twelve books in the series, one for each relic…

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the most powerful political and social organization in Copernicus’s neck of the woods was the Teutonic Knights. The Knights have reorganized in modern times, keeping some of their traditions in the way that the Guardians have. The problem is that they are organized to collect the relics first and use the time machine for their own mysterious but clearly evil purposes. Not only do our new Guardians have to trace the clues of the Copernicus legacy, but they have to outsmart the Teutonic Knights and keep from getting killed or kidnapped by them.

While Mr. Abbott has written over fifty books, the series of his that I am familiar with is the Danger Guys. These books were for younger readers, grades 2-4, but they were page turners. Nearly every chapter ended with the two Danger Guys in some new danger. Abbott does the same here: lots of action, lots of close calls. The action includes burglaries, murders, crypts, underground tunnels, sword fights, jumping from trains, kidnapping, caves, a jungle trek, a car chase, just to name a few. The locations include Texas, Germany, Italy, Bolivia, and Guam. Wild stuff! What does Abbott have left for an encore?

Here is one little hint to give you an idea of one puzzle that our Guardians have to solve. The Copernicus journal is written in various languages but mainly Latin. There is one term in English: legal man. Unscramble that, and there is the clue that takes our heroes to Guam. This suggests that Copernicus had some famous friends and correspondents.

P.S. A note to Tony: Navy SEALs use naval ranks, not Army ranks, so there are no sergeants in the SEALs.