The Coldest Touch is a sapphic vampire paranormal romance by Isabel Sterling.
Elise is a Death Oracle who can see premonitions of people’s deaths whenever she touches them. This is an interesting concept. The execution, however, removes any sort of suspense or tension we might feel for all of the main characters. We know how her friends will eventually die–we’re shown both of their deaths multiple times. And we know that a Death Oracle is the only one who can change someone’s death. So the villain threatening to kill her friends is meaningless.
The book also ends very abruptly and without a good resolution. The antagonist gets away and we’re told that other vampires are going to hunt her down and kill her offscreen. Why not just have killed her when it would have been interesting to do so?
Vampire and teenage human romance will never not feel wrong. It’s explained in this book as Claire being mentally and emotionally stuck at 17, but she’s still had almost a century of time and experience on Elise. There’s an imbalance there that feels icky.
There were multiple digs at Twilight which is so tired at this point. This book was published in 2022, but its stale sparkly skin jokes feel like they came right from 2008. While Twilight isn’t the greatest vampire love story ever told by any means, it definitely still has a much more interesting story than this book.
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