[2] Frances Taliaferro, reviewing the book for The New York Times, described Cold Heaven as "a chilly disappointment, a cheerless novel".

To readers who are already disposed to believe in miracles, the Carmel sections may be gratifying, but the unconverted will find neither a satisfying exploration of the psychology of visions nor a fully realized portrait of the sinner who becomes God's unwilling agent.

There are, he says, "many echoes of his earlier novels, in its settings of Nice, New York and Carmel, and in its exploitation of such recurring concerns as marital infidelity, guilt and the day-to-day conflicts between faith and disbelief, between free will and various forms of determinism... Our capitulation at the outset to the basic elements of the 'thriller' story... is soon reinforced by our involvement with Marie's metaphysical and spiritual dilemmas, and we are not entirely certain whether she is free at the end, or whether she is still to be, as Yeats states in his poem of the same title, 'stricken by the injustice of the skies for punishment'".

[1] Kirkus Reviews said: "this intriguing, half-satisfying novel is finally an entertainment, a theological Twilight Zone episode, a modernized Bernadette of Lourdes--instead of the electrifying parable that a French writer, a Mauriac or a Leon Bloy, say, might have made out of the premises and tensions of the same material.

Directed by Nicolas Roeg, the adaptation stars Theresa Russell as Marie, Mark Harmon as Alex and James Russo as Daniel.