Chain of Gold is the first installment in Cassandra Clare's latest series, The Last Hours.

An expertly trained warrior since birth, Cordelia Carstairs is a Shadowhunter sworn to protect the world from demons. Yet, she was not trained to have her father taken away from her for a crime he didn't commit. As he's being held by the Conclave, the Carstairs family is whisked away to begin anew in London. Comforted by the thought of her longtime friends James and Lucie Herondale being there to support her, Cordelia agrees to leave her home behind. 

Though Cordelia believes her only responsibility is to blend into the shadows, there are other things expected of her being that she is a young woman during the early 1900's. Cordelia's mother is desperate to marry her off in the hopes it allies their family with influential people who could help their father, but Cordelia doesn't want to be saved, she wants to charter her own path and be the hero of her own story. As she struggles to gain aid in her mission to free her father and balance her friendship with Lucy, she must also hide her growing love for James, who is sworn to marry someone else. Then chaos erupts.

Suddenly, London is not the safe haven the Shadowhunters believed it to be. Demons are appearing without warning, and are sporting abilities they have never possessed before. Suddenly they attack in sunlight, possess an unidentifiable and incurable poison and a keen intelligence they aren't supposed to have. The most terrifying of all, is that they don't seem to die. London is immediately quarantined, and amongst all of the distress, Cordelia and her friends discover that they themselves have a dark link to these occurrences. This dark link has given them abilities that other Shadowhunters do not possess, abilities that are the only way of stopping the attacks. Though Cordelia always wanted to be a hero, she begins to realize that it is not as glamorous as she once thought, and that being a hero comes with a brutal price.

As usual, Cassandra Clare was able to entrance me in Cordelia and James' story within minutes. Seamless writing, complex characters and a vivid, brilliant universe are all tightly wound into every page of this novel. I absolutely adored the perspective from which this novel was written, because she managed to turn something as simple as a third person narrative into a viewpoint I felt like I'd never read through before. The scenes within this story are written so vividly I feel as if they paint their way across the pages. This is a book I highly, highly recommend.

I guarantee you will not be disappointed.