The hero, Danny Mac, is 19 and in his prime. He's the coolest smackhead in Doncaster, girls are queuing for his favours and he's got a bunch of mates to go thieving with. Life is about as sweet as he can imagine it.
Then things go wrong. A local psycho kills a friend of Danny's, then suspects Danny and his mates of grassing. Danny and his crew flee to London, but the psychos have an uncanny knack of turning up on their doorstep. Meanwhile Regina, the girl Danny left behind, kills herself and Danny is shocked into a sense of the devastation he's wreaking and begins to make a move towards redemption, aided by the hallucinatory intervention of a long-dead philosopher saint and a medieval princess . . .
