The Misfit Diaries Book One

The Beasts That Create Us is the first of three thrilling contemporary western crime novels about the profoundly savage life of Iriki, a wild-at-heart mixed-race lesbian girl who is crippled by polio. This is the first of three coming-of-age stories about this exceptional girl who is raised on her gun-thug father’s ranch in crime-rife Texas during the tumultuous gangster-driven decades of the 1960s and 70s.

Iriki “Ranger” Medina, the illegitimate daughter of an illegal immigrant, is trapped in a cycle of dramatic sexual awakenings and wildly criminal adventures. Her larger-than-life father, Tarahumara witch grandmother, and her free-thinking mother raise Iriki as if she were a boy on the remote Texas hill country homestead. Her life is defined and redefined by shocking cycles of victory, defeat, and redemption — all related and all mysterious.

Will she survive the extremes of emotion and physicality? Will she survive the fires forging her into the woman of strength, beauty, and legend she strives to be? Or will she die a hopelessly scarred denizen sacrificed to the flames of failure kindled by the people, places, and events of her life? Only the whispering spirits of the wild world she lives in know.

Based on the secret events of a strong-willed young woman’s life in the 1960s and 70s, The Beasts That Create Us  is an allegory of overcoming adversity and seeking a life well lived. Beasts thrills with crime, clues, twists of fate, and most important: the discovery of mysterious courage and strength. If you enjoy compelling crime and psychological thrillers like My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and We Are All The Same In The Dark by Julia Heaberlin, you will fall in love with The Beasts That Create Us , the first novel in the Misfit Diaries Series.