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Fans of Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters world will no doubt enjoy her latest series, The Last Hours, set a generation after her Infernal Devices series. The Shadowhunters books that began with City of Bones (first book in the Mortal Instruments set) have spawned quite a few series and supplemental books at this point. I completely gobbled up the first few books in the Mortal Instruments series, and while the Infernal Devices books (well, all of the series) decidedly follow what’s now a predictable pattern, I found them irresistible too. The end of that set of books had me teary-eyed.
So it’s a sweet opportunity in Chain of Gold to come back to this turn-of-the-century era with the children of beloved characters Will Herondale and his wife, the former Tessa Gray, and for their dear friend Jem Carstairs to be around as a Silent Brother. Now, their children James and Lucie are protagonists, along with other young Shadowhunters who are children of characters in the Infernal Devices. Along with James, a main character in Chain of Gold is a Carstairs, a cousin of Jem’s: Cordelia. She and her brother, Alastair, have moved around as they’ve grown up, and now they have arrived in London, but under a cloud of sorts because their father has been accused of a crime. Cordelia’s main goal is to find someone who can help clear her father’s name and to become a great Shadowhunter, aided by her family’s legendary sword Cortana; her mother’s goal is to marry off Cordelia to someone with a good name.
The city of London has remained largely free of serious demon attacks for some years, but now strange demons begin attacking throughout the city, and in the daylight hours, which isn’t normally possible. They seem to be unkillable, and they’re infecting Shadowhunters they bite with a deadly poison.
James and Lucie, thanks to their mother being a warlock, have demonic blood, and it is providing them with unusual talents. But they have to figure out how they can harness them to defeat what may be an exceptionally powerful higher demon.
And, all the while, Cordelia pines after James, who is longing for a young woman whose mother has kept her hidden away in an old mansion in Idris, and plenty of other hearts are hoping and breaking.
I couldn’t completely get on board with the more recent series before this one, The Dark Artifices, and haven’t even finished it. So I am happy to be able to get caught up again with this one.
Rated: Moderate. These books have little profanity. What they do feature is a lot of action and fighting with demonic creatures, with lots of “ichor” (demonic blood) spilled. Sexual content here should have been fairly tame, since it’s set in an earlier time period with stricter mores, but there is one scene that involves passionate kissing that moves into fondling very quickly. That was unexpected. I feel that the author is getting more free with her teen characters’ sexuality the more she writes about them. That’s in part why I preferred the first 3 books of the first series and wasn’t thrilled about the Dark Artifices.
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