The Drift

The Drift follows three intercut storylines during a brutal winter storm in a near-collapse world shaped by a devastating, mutating virus. A bus of elite academy students crashes and becomes a sealed tomb in a snowdrift. A cable car full of “volunteers” for a mysterious facility stalls high above a valley, where a murder and a missing weapon turn strangers into suspects. And at the secluded “Retreat,” a handful of survivors rely on horrific practices to stay alive—until everything breaks loose.

As the temperature drops and time runs out, alliances fracture, secrets surface, and each thread reveals a deeper conspiracy involving quarantine, human experimentation, and a ruthless “shutdown” policy. The story builds toward a bleak, high-stakes convergence where the question isn’t just who will live—but what they’ll become to keep living.

• Listeners who love fast, cinematic survival thrillers with escalating danger and moral ambiguity.
• Fans of locked-room narratives (trapped spaces, limited resources) and multi-POV tension.
• Readers drawn to dark post-pandemic dystopias, conspiracies, and hard-hitting twists.

C. J. Tudor is a British novelist known for dark, macabre thrillers. She has worked as a trainee reporter, radio scriptwriter, dog walker, voiceover artist, television presenter, and copywriter. Her debut The Chalk Man became a Sunday Times bestseller and sold internationally; subsequent novels also hit bestseller lists and have been optioned or adapted for TV. She lives in Sussex with her family.