The study of higher dimensional black holes, branes and their interactions is an active field of research in several different areas of modern theoretical physics. One interesting direction, which has been recently introduced by V. Frolov, is to consider a brane - black hole (BBH) toy model for studying merger- and topology changing transitions in higher dimensional classical general relativity, or in certain strongly coupled gauge theories through the AdS/CFT correspondence. In the present talk I will discuss the properties of the above BBH system beyond the Dirac-Nambu-Goto approximation, i.e. I will consider some effects of higher order curvature corrections in the brane action.