Bea and Antonia are sisters, but they are living very different lives. They were both pregnant with their sons around the same time, but that’s where the resemblance stops.

Antonia was married to a doctor and lived in a big house. She had trouble getting pregnant, but once the IVF worked, she and her husband Owen gave their son Jack everything he could want. He was born early, but he was given the best medical care and the best education, and most importantly, he had an M negative test result, which literally opened doors that were closed to others.

Antonia had Jack tested when he was an infant, shortly after the testing was just starting. The M gene was the genetic component of violence in men, so boys who test negative are afforded a freedom in life, since the women around them could be certain he wouldn’t grow up to be a threat. It was the M positive boys who grew up to be rapists and wife beaters, addicts and killers.

Bea gave birth to her son Simon in the bathroom of the hospital. She had a partner, Alfie, but they didn’t live in a big house. They were barely scraping by, Bea having to go back to work while trying to find affordable daycare for Simon. She refused to have Simon tested, as a positive test would have doomed him to a life worse than poverty. Not knowing was difficult, but having a positive test would mean he wouldn’t be able to get into any daycare or school, wouldn’t be able to get a decent job, wouldn’t have any kind of future as well.

But things got more difficult for Simon as the years went on. Testing became more prevalent, as did the discriminations against boys testing positive, and against boys who are untested. So when Simon turned 18, he decided to get tested, and got his mother to take them to her sister’s house. It had been years since he had seen Jack, and the two of them had a plan to get Simon tested so he would have a negative result.

But in those years, Owen had opened a clinic for M positive boys, helping come up with treatment plans for families that involve specific parenting interventions and sometimes medication. He figured that if they could catch these boys early and shape their behavior as they grew up, they could still be productive members of society. But Owen has a secret that could have repercussions for the clinic and the marriage.

And as it turns out, the sisters both have secrets of their own too. One of those secrets could destroy a family. But the other one could destroy them all, including the boys. Especially the boys.

One of the Boys is a roiling domestic thriller filled that feels all too possible in the near future. Author Jayne Cowie has crafted this story of contrasts, rich and poor, good and bad, potential and actual, honest and deceitful, and used them to shine a light on basic human behavior in a compelling, chilling way. Seeing these families struggle with the positive diagnosis, with the decision to even get tested, with a society that wants to pigeonhole citizens into simple categories is powerful and really makes you question everything you think about the people you see around you every day.

I am a psychology nerd, so that premise of the M gene hooked me immediately. But as I got pulled into the lives of these characters, I saw just how complicated this situation could get. Cowie does a masterful job of showing all sides of this, the boys who are negative getting breaks they may not deserve, the boys who are positive getting stigmatized and shunned from proper society, the boys who are untested getting lost somewhere in between. One of the Boys is not just an unputdownable story, it’s also a foreshadowing of where we could al end up if we’re not careful.

But mostly, it’s just an amazing read!

Egalleys for One of the Boys were provided by Berkley through NetGalley, with many thanks.