The Beasts That Create Us is the first of three thrilling coming-of-age contemporary western crime novels about the profoundly savage life of Iriki, a wild-at-heart mixed-race lesbian girl who is crippled by polio.

Iriki “Ranger” Medina, the illegitimate daughter of an illegal immigrant, is raised on her gun-thug father’s ranch in crime-rife Texas during the tumultuous gangster-driven decades of the 1960s and 70s. 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.

If you love discovering secrets of hidden Americana, contemporary western thrillers, strong-willed women, gangland criminality, and the two Netflix hits Godless and Longmire, you will fall in love with The Beasts That Create Us, the first novel in the Misfit Diaries.