The second of the Melrose novels. Bad News takes Patrick into his early twenties. Constrained to fly to New York to collect his monstrous father’s ashes, fully in the grip of massive addiction, he endures a weekend hunting for drugs and attempting to avoid figures from David Melrose’s life. This is a brilliant portrait of socialite Manhattan and its dark avenues, and of a hallucinatory, desperate attempt to hide from the encroaching past.