Dead as a Doornail
Cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse is used to dealing with the unusual, but this time it's personal. Her brother Jason is about to undergo his first were-panther change, and a mysterious sniper is targeting the local shapeshifter community. When Jason becomes a suspect, Sookie must race against the full moon to find the real killer before she becomes the next target.
Sookie's brother, a were-panther in the making.
Vampire sheriff of Area Five who secretly hires Sookie a bodyguard while struggling to admit how much he cares for her.
A werewolf vying for his father's old pack leadership, who leans on Sookie for help and later proposes a relationship.
Sookie's shapeshifting boss, shot in the leg during the sniper's spree and fiercely, sometimes overbearingly, protective of her.
It's the fifth novel in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse (Southern Vampire Mysteries) series, published by Ace Books on May 3, 2005.
Yes. The unabridged audiobook is narrated by Johanna Parker and runs about 8 hours and 57 minutes.
Quinn is a rare weretiger introduced in this book. He competes in the local werewolf pack's leadership contest and shows a clear romantic interest in Sookie, setting up his larger role in later books.
The novel predates HBO's True Blood adaptation, which draws its characters and Bon Temps setting from the Sookie Stackhouse series but had already diverged into its own plotlines by this point in the books.