After a group of people on a sailing trip have to go into the life raft, they hope to drift into a shipping lane and be resued before their supplies run out. As tensions run high within the group, an abandoned drifting ship seems the perfect escape-until they discover what is lurking below decks. After trying to evade the deadly sharks around the raft, they have to deal with mutated animals and deadly cannibals.
This book's lesson seems to be 'remember less is more'. There were way too many elements going on and I felt that none of them were done well. I liked the start of the story with the obnoxious people on the life raft and the fear of the sharks around them but it all went downhill for me as soon as they got onto the ship. The cannibals are the former crew and passengers who have had to turn to cannibalism to survive but instead of Hills Have Eyes type cannibals, they have become religious zealots who do weird ceremonies with mutant animals. It is all focused on these zealots rather than the scary animals which only appear each time the heroes are being chased. And that is the problem with the book. It is so repetitive. The MCs are trapped or caught by the cannibals, they escape, get hunted, get caught, escape, and so on. We get glimpses of big snakes and other nasties but not as prominent in the story as I hoped we'd get.
The characters were all dreadful and I didn't care much what happened to any of them. Keith and Elizabeth are obnoxious idiots who deserved anything coming to them. Lily was a complete weirdo whose behaviour was strange even before the disaster and it becomes clear that she is a psycho. Logan is another strange fish who seemed to be making jokes at the worst possible times and being a moron. Dale wasn't greatly exciting but Shona was about the best of them. I didn't much care for the religious demented cannibal story and wanted more of a creature feature which I didn't get. I was pretty disappointed overall with the repetition, the plot and the way it was written.