While at play one day, James accidentally causes the drowning of his friend Ryan in the local canal and flees the scene, apparently unseen. Ratcatcher follows James as he tries to live with his terrible secret and shows how it affects his life and relationships. Along the way he strikes up a touching intimacy with an older girl whom the other estate boys use for sex, falls in with a gang of hoods, and dreams desperately of leaving the projects and moving to one of the clean, new houses being built a few miles out of town. In the end, though, he cannot escape his circumstances any more than he can escape his guilt over Ryan's death. Ratcatcher is a finely wrought, unsentimental, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale.