The Devil's Cellar

The title of the book, The Devils Cellar, is the translation of Casillero del Diablo, a fine Chilean wine produced in the central region of the country. The wine (a 2006 Merlot) and the story are inexorably linked, creating a symbiosis of alcohol and words to produce the perfect environment for the reader by stimulating four out of the five human senses. Only the sense of hearing remains untroubled. But did you hear that noise from behind you? Is it the Devil waiting for your soul?

The wine weaves its way through the book becoming a witness to the events within each chapter and although it is never opened, the souls of the characters are, and their varying emotions too often spilled. Ultimately, the unopened bottle is used as a murder weapon and the hunt for the perpetrator intertwines with the journey of the bottle from suspect to suspect, thus linking the stories and creating the spine of the novel. The reader experiences, in turn, love, lust, jealousy, murder, suicide, revenge, hatred, greed, theft, intolerance, blackmail, mental illness, drug abuse and religious bigotry, to name but a few, often under the watchful eye of Beelzebub himself. There are more twists and turns in the novel than there are in a corkscrew.