La Curée (1871–72; English: The Kill) is the 2nd novel in Émile Zola's 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy Nouveau riche of the Second French Empire, against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s. Vastly different from its predecessor and prequel La Fortune des Rougon, La Curée - the portion of the game thrown to the dogs after a hunt, and thus usually translated as The Kill - is a character study of three personalities: Aristide Rougon (renamed "Saccard")--the youngest son of the ruthless and calculating peasant Pierre Rougon and the bourgeois Félicité (by whom he is much spoiled), both of them Bonapartistes and consumed by a desire for wealth, Aristide's young second wife Renée (his first dying not long after their move from provincial Plassans to Paris) and Maxime, Aristide's foppish son from his first marriage. From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

This book is included in Project Gutenberg.