London-based Buccaneer has been on a roll recently. Last week, its Irvine Welsh drama for ITVX and BritBox International bagged star Dougray Scott a best actor win at the International Emmys, and it is making a pair of shows for Paramount+, Tudor’s The Burning Girls and The Doll Factory. Halcyon, meanwhile, counts Hunters and Disney+’s The Mysterious Benedict Society among its credits. There are A LOT of characters to keep straight and I struggled with that. In addition, I found the two main women, HANNAH and MEG, to be interchangeable with little to distinguish one from the other. It's a bit of a passion project, if you will, a little outside of her normal lane. I would never want to poo-poo on anyone's creativity, so it hurts that this one didn't hit with me more. Her books have the ability to simultaneously make you unable to stop reading while wishing you could bury the book somewhere deep underground where it can't be found. Compelling and haunting' Sunday Express

The atmosphere, while gripping for the first 50%, became unimpressive for the rest of the book. *There are only so many ways you can tell someone how cold and snowy it is.Hannah awakens to carnage, all mangled metal and shattered glass. After she was evacuated from a secluded boarding school during a snowstorm, her coach careered off the road, trapping her with a handful of survivors. They’ll need to work together to escape—with their sanity and secrets intact. The chilling prologue presents readers with a nameless, soon-to-be-faceless, body. It lies in the snow about to be scavenged by a passing group of crows. The primary chill comes soon afterwards when they fall dead from the sky. This sequence briefly highlights the pandemic that has contaminated mankind. Its effects are brought to us through three individual narratives, each told from a different character’s point of view. A Cable car has stopped, on its way to a place called “The Retreat”. Inside is MEG, a former detective, and a mother who lost her daughter to the virus. When she discovers a dead man amongst the occupants, she suspects that the car was halted on purpose. CJ Tudor excels at creating stories that ooze atmosphere. Thrillers set during snowstorms is one of my favorite tropes, and this one delivered. I felt the cold and the terror of being trapped and in danger on all sides (especially in that cable car *shudder*). Still this book was extremely hard to put down and I zipped through it in a mere couple sittings. If you’re a fan of C. J. Tudor and are looking for a read on a cold snowy night, I highly recommend this one.

I think if you read this for pure entertainment, it might be an o.k. read. Tudor's intricate plotting and well described characters in her earlier books are not to be found here. Meg is still groggy, but she knows she is on a mission to get someone. She discovers the identity of the dead body sharing the cable car with her and now must look at everyone else on board as potential murder suspects. Eventually, Meg is caught in a kind of whodunnit where the people around her are dying one by one. This leaves her to wonder who she can trust and why they are eliminating everyone on board a vehicle that appears to have doomed each of them to death anyway, as no sign of rescue seems to exist. The Drift is a novel that involves three different groups of people trapped in a snowstorm in different settings with and a murderer in their midst. The stories are independent from each other, all based on the same virus and aftermath, but join up expertly, bringing them all together with ease. What is the author trying to tell us? Is this an anti-vax book? When you read it you will know why this is a question. Is this book trying to tell us that scientists should never play "God" and there is a limit as to what they can accomplish? Or is anything fair game when fighting a deadly virus?

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The reason this hurts so much is because I've read A Sliver of Darkness, which was a fantastic collection BTW, where in the Author's Note, Tudor discusses this most recent release and what it meant to her. C.J. Tudor is a writer of roller-coaster fiction--you're thrilled, maybe a little afraid and you can't wait for the end, but once it does you find yourself yelling, "Again."

Three ordinary people risk everything for a chance at redemption in this audacious, utterly gripping novel of catastrophe and survival at the end of the world, from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man. A highly contagious virus with a 75% death rate has wiped out civilization leaving just a few survivors. Those who caught the virus are either dead or become something else...

C. J. Tudor

She left school at sixteen and has had a variety of jobs over the years, including trainee reporter, radio scriptwriter, shop assistant, ad agency copywriter and voiceover. I’ve enjoyed other books by Tudor, but this one didn’t do it for me. I recommend it more for fans of horror stories. Wow, I had to sit and absorb this one in. I only read one CJ Tudor before The Drift and the style is very different. Where "The Burning Girls" was dark with haunted vibes, The Drift is a real-deal horror that's violent and full of despair. Some scenes will probably even gross you out. 🤢 First up is Hannah. We watch her wake up aboard a tipped-over coach filled with other students like herself, the vehicle trapped in a huge snowdrift. The driver is not in his seat, although the survivors are surrounded by equal amounts of dead bodies from this ill-fated ride. Lots of tension, wondering how the three groups are going to survive the nightmare with seemingly no escape. It’s also gripping waiting to discover just how the groups are linked, but with C.J.Tudor at the helm it’s all brought together nicely, and a difficult one to put down!

C.J. Tudor' s new book is just so good that I don't know how she will top this one but please keep writing Ms. Tudor because I and all of your other fans will keep reading and waiting for each new unique creation that your imagination brings to written words! What a clever well thought out book by C.J. Tudor! I will admit there were times when I thought "where is this all going?" and then Tudor took me there!!! Yet again, Tudor has blown me away with her well thought out plot, use of tension, level of danger, interesting characters and bleak environment.

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This story essentially follows characters in three different survival scenarios. We have a group of young people, fleeing a private school in the midst of a blizzard, whose coach violently hits a snow drift, trapping them in the vehicle in extremely hazardous conditions.