When Lucie Herondale is ten, a teenage boy helps her in the woods. These children have been trained but they’ve never really faced demons so they are horrified when demons start to show up in the daylight and attack.

There is always something different about each series other than the time setting and what’s interesting here is that we start in a time of peace where the characters all know each other and have a mostly calm, loving past with some soap opera-y issues, but unlike TDA specifically (being the last series released) they have no dark past of fighting.

If you truly don’t care this does stand alone, but I think it would be much less enjoyable- like if you only watched Episode III of Star Wars without context of the other movies. But I would recommend reading Shadowhunters in chronological order if you haven’t already. There are also characters relevant to the latest series, The Dark Artifices- strangely the original series The Mortal Instruments is least relevant to this one. And for those that didn’t get much attention such as Anna, it gave history and reasons to their actions so for that reason I would recommend reading the novellas first, The Infernal Devices so you have attachment to all the parents, who are fairly prominent- also there are certainly spoilers for deaths and endgames in The Infernal Devices. And I think reading the novellas involving these characters really put me in a good position because it’s a new trilogy but I already felt like I knew most of the new cast. Falling into and tearing through them always feels easy, no matter how long they are. But that doesn’t change that the Shadowhunter Chronicles are my favourite book series, the only one I will buy myself rather than as Christmas presents or borrow from a library, and the only books I will write opinions and reactions in- maybe one day I’ll pass them onto my kids and they can see and experience my love for these books. Humanity is drawn to light not darkness.” It comes when it comes, and we try to remember, even though we cannot imagine a day when it will release its hold on us, that all pain fades. “We do not get to choose when in our lives we feel pain.

Shadowhunters chain of gold