New Mexico is the setting for this thriller, a police procedural in which almost all the characters work in law enforcement. Unlike most crime tales the police themselves are the targets of violent crime and have to figure out who is shooting at them and why.

Paul Grayhorse is a PI with an injured shoulder from his police days, and he is working a domestic abuse case when the female client doesn't show up and someone fires at him instead. He calls his brothers for backup and their police status helps summon US Marshal Kendra Armstrong to the case. Paul, from a Navaho family, wears a carved lynx totem and he meets a wild lynx when hosting Kendra in a canyon cabin. The marshal is searching for a vicious fugitive named Miller suspected of shooting a judge and a policewoman, Paul's former partner. Paul uses his local sources of information including street girls, but the reader just knows that the addict girl who saw Miller is going to wind up dead. Similarly, no matter how many times someone shoots at Paul and Kendra, or drives straight at them, they get taken by surprise.

Kendra figures out that so few people know her movements, it must mean a leak in her office or that of the local police, and by a process of elimination they work out who it might be, though the motive is still unclear. A trap must be set, and far from calling for aid from the FBI or a SWAT team, they decide to tell as few people as possible, mainly just Paul's brothers.

SECRETS OF THE LYNX did not engage me as much as Aimee Thurlo's many other excellent Southwest works, mainly because the total concentration on police officers made for a less rounded story than usual. The jargon and mechanisms of police work, such as photographing a suspect's finger on a phone and sending the print to a databank, are no doubt accurate but by themselves they do not carry a story. The two principal characters form a believable relationship, but I doubted that under the stress of potential assassination they would suddenly relax and start chatting about whether to adopt a foreign baby. The landscape Thurlo knows so well is an integral part of the story however and her many followers will doubtless want to add this to their collection. The novel could also help to introduce romance readers to Thurlo's crime writings.