Jacques Lantier, son of the Lantier who abandoned Gervaise in L’Assommoir, drives an express locomotive between Paris and Le Havre and fights an inherited craving to kill. When a jealous stationmaster and his young wife murder a powerful old man in a railway carriage, Jacques glimpses the crime, and passion, guilt and fear begin to bind them together.
Zola’s railway thriller from the Rougon-Macquart cycle, in Edward Vizetelly’s early English translation. Download the free EPUB.