Clockwork Angel — The Infernal Devices, Book 1

Clockwork Angel Review

Cassandra Clare returned to the Shadowhunter universe she built in The Mortal Instruments and did something that companion series rarely manage: she improved on the original. Clockwork Angel relocates the Shadowhunter mythology to Victorian London in 1878, and the effect is transformative. The world Clare built always felt like it needed historical roots, and the gaslit streets of the London Institute give the Angel Raziel’s legacy exactly the antiquity and grandeur it required.

Tessa Gray arrives from New York to find her brother, only to be seized by two women called the Dark Sisters who force her to develop a power she did not know she possessed: the ability to transform into anyone she physically touches, taking on not just their appearance but fragments of their memories and personality. The ability is unusual in the Shadowhunter world, and unusual abilities attract dangerous interest.

Rescued by the London Institute’s Shadowhunters, Tessa falls into the orbit of Will Herondale and Jem Carstairs — two parabatai whose friendship is the emotional foundation of the trilogy. Will is immediately the more complex figure: beautiful, cruel, and hiding behind his cruelty with a desperation that Tessa half-perceives from the first meeting. Jem is his mirror — gentle, musical, and living under a death sentence from a demon poison that is slowly consuming him.

Clare handles the Victorian setting with genuine attention to period detail: the Institute’s politics, the attitude of the Clave toward London’s mundane population, the social constraints on women that make Tessa’s independence both remarkable and costly. The steampunk clockwork villains — Mortmain’s mechanical soldiers — feel properly Victorian in their horror.

As first volumes go, Clockwork Angel is unusually complete: its mystery resolves, its characters are fully established, and it earns rather than merely sets up the emotional stakes to come.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Clare’s finest opening chapter, and the best argument for why the Victorian setting was always where the Shadowhunter world belonged.

Reading Order

1. Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, Book 1)
2. Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, Book 2)
3. Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, Book 3)

Reading Guides

• Cassandra Clare Books in Order: Complete Shadowhunters Reading Guide (2026)

Why the Victorian Setting Works

The decision to set the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy in 1878 London rather than a contemporary city was not simply an aesthetic choice. The Victorian setting solves a fundamental problem that the Mortal Instruments’ New York setting occasionally created: in contemporary New York, the question of why Shadowhunters don’t simply use modern technology to solve their problems is always lurking. In 1878 London, the absence of such technology is natural, and the Shadowhunters’ methods — physical combat, rune magic, the political structures of the Clave — feel proportionate to the world they inhabit.

More significantly, the Victorian period gives the Shadowhunter mythology the depth of history it always implied but the contemporary setting couldn’t fully deliver. When characters in the Mortal Instruments mention that Shadowhunters have been fighting demons for centuries, it is an abstract claim. In Clockwork Angel, the claim is visible: the Institute’s architecture, the social conventions, the relationship between the Clave and the British mundane establishment — all of it embeds the mythology in a specific historical moment that makes it feel genuinely old.

The Infernal Devices as the Best Entry Point

A significant portion of Shadowhunter Chronicles readers now recommend starting with Clockwork Angel rather than City of Bones, despite the chronological inversion. The argument is structural: the Infernal Devices is Clare’s most focused series — three books, a single central story, a love triangle that functions as the emotional spine without competing with a dozen other plot threads — and the Victorian setting is more immediately atmospheric than contemporary New York.

The counterargument, equally valid, is that the emotional weight of the Infernal Devices’ connections to the Mortal Instruments characters — particularly the Herondale legacy — lands harder if the reader already knows those characters. Both reading orders have genuine advocates.

Tessa’s Ability

The shapeshifting ability that Clare gives Tessa — the capacity to become anyone she touches, accessing their memories and personality — is the most narratively sophisticated power Clare has invented for any of her protagonists. It is useful in ways that drive the plot, and it is costly in ways that complicate the character: to transform into someone is to be temporarily invaded by them, to lose the boundaries between yourself and the person you are inhabiting. Tessa’s relationship to her own identity — already complicated by her uncertain origins and her displacement from America to England — is sharpened by an ability that makes identity itself permeable.

Clare uses the ability throughout the series with genuine creative intelligence, not simply as a plot mechanism but as a way of developing Tessa’s relationship to herself and others.

The Clockwork Mythology

Mortmain’s clockwork soldiers are the series’ most distinctive invention — mechanical constructs animated by demon energy, combining Victorian technological aesthetics with the series’ supernatural mythology in ways that feel genuinely original. The clockwork warriors are not simply golems with a steampunk aesthetic; they are a specific kind of horror built on the violation of natural categories, the replacement of living things with constructed imitations that preserve the form while eliminating everything that made the form worth preserving.

That thematic weight — what does it mean to replicate life without reproducing what makes life meaningful — gives the Infernal Devices trilogy a philosophical undercurrent that the Mortal Instruments’ more action-oriented mythology didn’t fully explore.