A tense psychological thriller, Border Crossing investigates the crimes of particularly violent children, the notion of evil and the possibility of redemption.

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from suicide, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he had hoped to forget.

Danny, full of suppressed memory and now free from prison, turns to Tom to help him recount what really happened, and discover the truth.

Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world, a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt are blurred and confused.

On 12 February of that year, two-year-old James Patrick Bulger was taken from his mother's side whilst in a shopping centre, and suffered ten skull fractures as a result of an iron bar striking his head.

They pass the derelict remnants of their decaying neighbourhood, with numerous buildings awaiting demolition or already burnt to the ground, and litter strewn across the path.

They stop to observe a young man pause at the edge of a pier, swallow a handful of pills and disappear into the depths of the icy-cold river.

Struggling with the body, Tom manages to drag the boy back towards the bank of the river through the thick, repugnant mud.

He'd been unprepared for the sight of such a young boy, knowing that he had committed the murder of an elderly lady named Lizzie Parks.

His mother, still grieving for her husband after several years, denies any difficulties, though Tom observes that she is withering quickly in the absence of physical love.

After playing "piggy in the middle" in the garden for about twenty minutes, they had ignored their parents' warnings and had visited the pond, rumoured to have a flooded well in the centre of it.

A man on a bus, glancing up from his paper, had witnessed this spectacle and come to Neil's aid, preventing what might have escalated into an horrific death.

He had also been raped in prison, a startlingly intimate revelation which Tom attributes to Danny's distinct lack of sense of normal social distance and pacing.

Frustrated with his life, Danny had returned to the prison, and Martha Pitt, his parole officer, had collected him from the waiting room.

A child psychologist, and the central character of the third-person narrative, Tom originally proclaimed Danny capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and of understanding the notion of death as a permanent state.

At age 11, Danny murdered an elderly woman named Lizzie Parks, smothering her with a pillow before "play[ing]" with her deceased body.

Based on Tom's testimony in court, Danny was sentenced to be tried as an adult, and served seven years at the Long Garth correctional institute.

His wife describes him as being "impervious" to the horrors of the children that he faces each and every day, but this also produces a sense of detachment, and Greene often sees only what he wishes to in people.

Stephen Molton and Frank Pugliese wrote the screenplay for the 2017 movie adaptation titled The Drowning, directed by Bette Gordon and scored by Anton Sanko.