Review of The Drift

Whoa – I did not know this was a gritty apocalyptic tale about a deadly virus, but I did read The Drift and I’m ready to tell you what I thought. Check out my Review of The Drift by C. J. Tudor

The Drift by C.J. Tudor

Published on January 31 2023 by Ballentine. Thanks to the publisher for giving me an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Hannah awakens to carnage, all mangled metal and shattered glass. The bus she was riding in careened over a hillside road during one of the year’s heaviest snowstorms, trapping her inside with a handful of survivors, a brewing virus, and no way to call for help.

If she and the remaining few want to make it out alive, with their sanity–and secrets–intact, they’ll need to work together or they’ll be buried alive.

A former detective, Meg awakens to a gentle rocking. She finds herself in a cable car suspended far above a snowstorm and surrounded by strangers in the same uniform as her, with no memory of how they got there.

They are heading to a mysterious place known to them only as “The Retreat,” but when they discover a dead man among their ranks and Meg spies a familiar face, she realizes that there is something far more insidious going on.

Carter is gazing out the window of the abandoned ski chalet that he and his ragtag compatriots call home. Together, they manage a precarious survival, manufacturing vaccines against a deadly virus in exchange for life’s essentials. But as their generator begins to waver, the threat of something lurking in the chalet’s depths looms larger, and their fragile bonds will be tested when the power finally fails–for good.

What Else has C.J. Tudor Written?

British author C.J. Tudor wrote The Chalk Man (2017), The Hiding Place (2019), The Other People (2020), The Burning Girls, which I reviewed (2021) and A Sliver of Darkness (2022).

Review of The Drift by C.J. Tudor

When I started reading The Drift, I wasn’t expecting a crazy, apocalyptic story with three different plot lines, a story that takes place in a world struggling with Choler, a deadly virus with a 75% mortality rate. There is no effective vaccine, but treatments with the plasma of the affected does seem to help somewhat.

The Drift felt a bit like The Walking Dead, a show I watched some of and then abandoned because I thought it was too repetitive and too gory.

The action takes place in three different locations: a crashed bus that has left surviving passengers trapped by a snowstorm, a group of people also trapped in a cable car that is dangling from its cables, and a group of people at the Retreat, where the virus is being studied.

After a bit of reading, I began to see that the storylines would probably interconnect, but it was hard to guess how. Also, in each location, people start dying, and not just from the virus. Picture three versions of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None playing out in three different locations.

The Drift doesn’t skimp on the gore, but it also does a good job with character development, giving each location a main character.

On the crashed bus, there’s Hannah, the daughter of the brilliant virologist who runs The Retreat.

In the cable car, there’s Meg, a former police officer who has been struggling with a horrible loss in her personal life and has to decide if she even wants to live.

In the Retreat, there’s Carter, an enigmatic character with a face disfigured by frostbite. When he and his fellow employees realize they’ve lost their generator in a terrible storm and people start dropping like flies, they begin to wonder what’s really going on at the Retreat.

I can see on my Goodreads feed that some people didn’t love the ending of this one, but I liked it!

If you love books that are really dark in tone and have a ton of action (I felt this read like the script for a movie) then definitely give The Drift a try.