Chain of Gold

Chain of Gold is a young adult urban fantasy novel by the American writer Cassandra Clare. It is the first book in The Last Hours, and chronologically the second sequence in The Shadowhunter Chronicles.

The story is set in and around London in 1903 and focuses on the residents of the London Institute. Cordelia Carstairs comes to the city with her mother and brother after her father is accused of a crime, intending to prove his innocence, and she is reunited with James and Lucie Herondale, whom she has known since childhood. Their world of parties and family alliances is the surface of the book; underneath it, James and his parabatai Matthew Fairchild and the rest of their circle are dealing with attacks on Shadowhunters in London. The novel opens with a flashback to 1897, when the ten-year-old Lucie Herondale was lost in a forest in Idris and found her way back with the help of a mysterious young boy. Cordelia is also carrying a love for James that she has to keep to herself, because he is promised to somebody else.

Clare's Shadowhunter books are set in the same invented world across several historical periods, and this sequence places its characters in Edwardian London. The chapter titles are taken from Victorian and Edwardian poetry that the characters would have known, and the book's own title comes from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.