story identification - Book series about a future where gene-modified sentient animals were used as soldiers and are trying to find a place in post-war human society

I am looking for a series of books (I owned 3 of them) by the same author, if this rings a bell for anyone, here's pieces of story that I remember:

First book sets the setting in some dystopian future where corporations experimented on DNA and created sentient humanoid soldiers based off different animals, whom were used in a bunch of wars and now that it's peace they are given same rights as humans, but there's lots of racism and stuff.

One of the main characters is an ex-soldier Bengal Tiger who owns a cat and just lost a job and is about to fall into complete poverty, and the other character is a woman who is hunted or something (don't quite remember), and they run together across country, fall in love, fret about them both being perverts and what will society think of this, but still get married and by the end of the book a single phrase about a ring on her finger reveals that the woman is also black (her race never mentioned before) which puts things into a perspective.

The second and third books I don't remember as distinctly, but there's another character, an ex-military woman who was heavily modified for the job and now is special forces or assassin or something, and accidentally she stumbles upon a huge conspiracy. She had a character trait, something about one of her implants going really awry because she cannot afford to replace it with a never one, it was a malfunctioning hand, I think, that died in the most inappropriate moment. And the Tiger appears again for some parts of the plot to help her find out what is happening.

There is a piece of plot that I remember about aliens crashing on Earth several hundred years ago and surviving. They made a fortune making and selling diamonds, and use money to hide themselves and manipulate Earth societies into war for some reason I don't remember, creating the race of those animal soldiers in the process. And the aliens are behind the huge conspiracy that characters are uncovering and by the end of the 3rd book the alien "lair" is found and a threatened-by-death alien is revealing all the plot secrets from all the books.

There was lots of heavy stuff about what makes us human, will we still be humans if our body and mind is modified, what is mind and how ours is different, how use of technology has responsibility before society, etc.

I bought those books about ten years ago in a "garage sale" of old city library stock, and they were printed mid-1990s, but it was a translation from English, so the original story must have been written earlier, even 80s maybe. I left those books in one of my old apartments and cannot remember their names by the life of me, but really want to read the story again.