The One (2018) by John Marrs is a USA Today best-selling novel and Wall Street Journal’s Best Science Fiction Book of 2018. The actual genre, however, is difficult to classify. While the story’s overarching premise is science-fiction, the individual stories range from romance to mystery and thriller.

Marrs says that inspiration for The One came from hearing about others’ love-at-first-sight experiences. He wondered what might account for the phenomenon and what would happen were everyone guaranteed such a connection. He tells the story in five novelettes, each with its own protagonist who acts out a different aspect of the promise of one true love.

Marrs is a full-time author and former journalist. He also received The International Thriller Writers Thriller Award for What Lies Between Us (2020), with The Good Samaritan (2018) as a finalist. The book has been adapted into a Netflix series.

Plot Summary

The One presents five synchronous narratives, each one exploring the possibility that everyone has a soulmate. In the novel, Match Your DNA is a company claiming that, provided with a client’s DNA sample, it can infallibly “Match” the client with their soulmate within the company’s genetic database.

The novel’s chapters cycle through the five protagonists’ plotlines. For the sake of continuity, this study guide’s summaries consolidate those chapters respective to each protagonist and further divide the summary into four parts.

First, lonely divorcée Mandy is notified that she is Matched with Richard. As she reviews his online history, however, she comes across an announcement for a remembrance service in Richard’s honor; he was struck in a hit-and-run accident. Mandy meets Richard’s mother and sister and begins spending more time with them. Eventually, Richard’s mother, Pat, offers Mandy the opportunity to carry Richard’s baby. Some years ago, Richard stored a sperm sample. Mandy, who has always wanted children, seizes the opportunity.

Six months later, a pregnant Mandy meets Richard’s ex-girlfriend, Michelle. Michelle tells Mandy that, after Richard’s accident, Pat and Chloe also tried to pressure her into having Richard’s baby. She also reveals that Richard is not dead: He survived the accident, although he has no brain activity and is not expected to recover.

Mandy finds Richard’s nursing home. When she touches him, he responds physically; he still has no brain activity, but contact with a Match might stimulate healing for his brain. Mandy confronts Pat and Chloe. She threatens to forever bar their contact with Richard’s child, and in a scuffle, she strikes her head, losing consciousness. When she wakes, she has been in the hospital for a week. Her baby has been taken by cesarean section, and Pat and Chloe have stolen him and disappeared. After weeks of fruitless searching, Mandy remembers that Pat owns a vacation cottage. Law enforcement finds Pat and Chloe there, and Mandy recovers her baby. Pat and Chloe are arrested.

Christopher

In the second storyline, serial killer Christopher is still at the scene of his latest murder when he gets the Match notification. He is narcissistically curious to see his perfect Match. When he shows up for his date with his Match, Amy, he learns she is a cop. Christopher is surprised that Amy fascinates him for her own sake. She is direct and assertive, unlike other women he’s been with.

Christopher grows increasingly captivated by Amy. Her personality is strong enough that he can’t dominate her. In addition, the more time Christopher spends with her, the more tedious his murder project feels. He would rather spend time with Amy but fears that if he abandons his ambition now, he might resent Amy and harm her. He grows impatient to finish his project so that he can devote his undivided attention to her.

Christopher is in the home of his final victim when Amy appears and shoots him with a stun gun. He almost convinces her that knowing her has changed him and that the relationship will keep him in check. However, Amy realizes that he will always be a danger to society and that if she turns him in, her career will be destroyed because she obliviously dated a murderer for so long. She kills him with his own murder weapon (a cheese wire garrote), burns his body, and hides every trace of his identity.

Jade

Jade has always wanted to travel but has neither the money nor the courage. Instead, she is stuck in a dead-end job. Moreover, although she found her Match, Kevin lives in Australia on the other side of the earth. When she bemoans this fact to her friends, they warn that if she doesn’t pursue him, she will end up like them, endlessly and unsuccessfully dating.

Finally persuaded, Jade arrives on Kevin’s doorstep only to discover that he has been hiding a terminal illness. However, Jade stays, unwilling to give him up so easily. Despite their time together, Jade feels no real attraction to Kevin. She does, however, feel an irresistible desire for Kevin’s older brother, Mark. Still, Kevin is her best friend. When he proposes to her, she accepts, wanting him to have the happiness of feeling loved. They share a few happy weeks before his death.

After Kevin dies, Jade is still tormented by feelings for Mark, who seems to be avoiding her. She decides to travel down the coast of Australia, finally fulfilling her dream to travel. As she prepares to leave, Mark confesses to Jade he returns her feelings. Mark reveals that Kevin and Jade were never Matched. When Kevin was diagnosed, he wanted to know whether he had a soulmate. He and Mark both submitted their DNA samples, and when Mark saw that he had been Matched and Kevin hadn’t, he switched their results. Mark was Jade’s Match all along.

Furious with Mark for lying to her, Jade pursues her plan for her trip. On the night before her departure, Mark and Kevin’s mother, Susan, finds her and tells her not to throw away her love for Mark. When Jade leaves the next morning, Mark goes with her.

Nick

Nick knows his fiancée Sally is his soulmate, but Sally convinces him to take the Match Your DNA test to be absolutely sure. When their results reveal they are not a Match, Nick is unperturbed and insists that while they may have to work a little harder than Matched couples, they can take the plunge and trust in themselves. The real surprise is that Nick, who believed himself heterosexual, is Matched to a man, Alex. Nick has no intention of meeting his Match, but Sally persuades him. To Nick’s surprise, he feels an instant overwhelming attraction to Alex.

Nick tries to avoid Alex. He still loves Sally and is committed to her. The attraction eats away at him, however, and he secretly spends more and more time with Alex. Finally, at a dinner party with friends, Nick lets slip that he has been seeing Alex. Sally accuses him of betraying her, even though she initially pushed Nick and Alex together. She breaks their engagement. Now that Nick is free, he and Alex plan to move to New Zealand, where Alex grew up. Before they leave, Sally calls Nick to tell him that she is pregnant. Nick wrestles with his desire to be with Alex and his obligation to his child. He decides to let Alex go, giving up his one true love.

The baby is born, but Sally dies of an aneurysm in childbirth. On seeing the child, Nick realizes it isn’t his. Sally had an affair. It changes nothing for him: Dylan is his son. He flies with Dylan to New Zealand to be with Alex.

Ellie

When Ellie, the CEO of Match Your DNA, gets the notification for a Match, she suspects it’s a joke. She has been registered for 10 years with no Match. After a quick background check, she decides to meet her Match, Tim. He seems perfectly ordinary, and she feels nothing, but she confidently awaits the spark.

Tim is charming and funny, and her feelings for him grow. The relationship chips away at her longstanding emotional armor. She invites him to the company Christmas party, where the head of human resources says she remembers Tim from a job interview two years earlier—but she refers to Tim as Matthew. Ellie dismisses it as a case of mistaken identity.

Ellie soon stumbles on some old pictures of Tim’s mother and recognizes her as Samantha Ward, a technician who worked for Ellie early in the Match Your DNA project. Ellie’s research reveals that Tim is actually Matthew Ward, Samantha’s son. When she confronts Tim, he confesses that he infiltrated her company to destroy it in revenge: Ellie was unscrupulous when she first developed the Match database, creating hazardous Match-making pitfalls that destroyed his mother’s life and many others’. Tim hacked into Match Your DNA’s computer system, and for over a year, the system has been generating a small percentage of false Matches.

Panicked and furious, Ellie murders him—but the whole exchange, including the murder, is live-streamed to the Internet. In the novel’s final scene, Ellie returns to the courthouse to hear the verdict of the jury. Before going in, she instructs her personal assistant that if Ellie is condemned, her assistant is to destroy the company database. Match Your DNA will be over.

In the end, the reader is left to wonder which, if any, of the Matches in the story were genuine.

Chapter Summaries & AnalysEs