Big Bad Beast

Big Bad Beast is a paranormal romance by the American writer Shelly Laurenston, published in 2011. It is one of her books about shape-shifters living in a version of the present where several species keep themselves hidden from human beings.

Dee-Ann Smith is a former Marine who works for a protection agency staffed entirely by shifters. She is direct, physically capable and uninterested in being managed, and the investigation she has taken on concerns something she cannot let go of: hybrids of her own kind are being taken, and she believes they are being used in dogfights.

Her boss, Ric Van Holtz, is a rich man with a talent for manoeuvring people and a long-standing interest in Dee-Ann that she has been ignoring. He insists on working the case with her, which she resents and finds useful in roughly equal measure, and the two of them have to stay coordinated while the inquiry takes them into parts of shifter society that would rather not be looked at. The book is the sixth in the series and keeps the tone of the others, in which the fights and the romance are equally physical.