There is a particular kind of dread that belongs to gatherings where everyone is smiling but no one is safe. Lisa Unger understands this intimately. Served Him Right by Lisa Unger opens with what should be a simple, cathartic event — a girls’ brunch hosted to exorcise a bad ex from the digital world — and steadily, deliciously peels it apart until every champagne flute is suspect and every friendship feels like a loaded weapon.
This is Unger at her sharpest. After more than twenty novels including Confessions on the 7:45, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six, and The New Couple in 5B, she has developed an almost surgical ability to lay bare the fault lines in seemingly stable relationships. Here, she takes that skill and weaves it through a narrative driven by poison — literal and figurative — asking uncomfortable questions about justice, loyalty, and the lengths women will go to protect themselves and each other.
The Brunch That Breaks Open
The premise is deceptively cozy. Ana Blacksmith, recently dumped by her boyfriend Paul Hayes via text, has gathered her closest friends and her older sister Vera for a celebratory brunch. The plan is an “ex-orcism” — a ritual unfollowing, blocking, and digital erasure of Paul from their collective online lives. Mimosas are poured. A charcuterie board gleams on the sideboard. Ana has even brought a homemade cassoulet. It should be cathartic.
Then a detective arrives at the door with news that Paul has been found dead in a shallow grave. And before anyone can process that revelation, Ana’s best friend Iggy collapses and is rushed to the hospital in a coma. What was meant to be a morning of champagne and sisterhood becomes a crime scene with everyone under suspicion.
Voices That Cut and Characters That Linger
What elevates Served Him Right by Lisa Unger beyond standard whodunit territory is its multi-perspective structure. The narrative rotates through several distinct voices, and Unger gives each one a texture and cadence that feels genuinely lived-in rather than assembled for plot convenience.
Ana is the volatile heart of the novel — impulsive, self-aware enough to name her worst impulses but not disciplined enough to resist them, wickedly funny in her observations of everyone around her. She is the kind of protagonist who makes you laugh one paragraph and wince the next. Her internal monologue crackles with dark humour and brutal honesty, particularly when she’s saddled with babysitting duties she never signed up for.
Vera, the elder sister, operates on a different frequency entirely. She is control personified — the kind of woman who has opinions about which serving platter is appropriate for last-minute cookie contributions. But her composure masks a past tangled with violence, sacrifice, and hard choices made far too young. The tension between what Vera presents to the world and what simmers beneath is one of the book’s most compelling threads.
The supporting cast is richly drawn as well. Some standout elements include:
- Iggy, the new mother whose warmth and vulnerability make her the emotional anchor even when she’s unconscious in a hospital bed
- Payton, the powerhouse attorney whose ability to back a detective out of a doorway with nothing but legal precision and Jimmy Choo confidence provides some of the novel’s most satisfying moments
- Esme, the tech CEO whose simmering resentment toward male mediocrity adds a layer of systemic critique
- Detective Timothy Bandeau, whose complicated personal connection to Ana transforms the investigation into something far more intimate and morally murky than a standard procedural
A Secret History Written in Roots and Remedies
The novel’s most distinctive element is the world-building around what Unger calls “The Cove” — a secret lineage of women herbalists whose knowledge of plants encompasses both healing and harm. Through flashbacks to Ana and Vera’s childhood with their Aunt Agnes, the book constructs a matrilineal tradition that reaches back centuries, one where the line between medicine and poison is a matter of dosage, and where female power has always had to hide itself to survive.
These passages, woven through the present-day mystery, give the book a weight that extends well beyond its thriller mechanics. Unger draws on real botanical history and the long persecution of women healers, grounding the fantastical elements in something that feels earned and researched rather than decorative.
A prose style that mirrors the poison it describes — smooth going down, with a slow burn after
Served Him Right by Lisa Unger is written in a voice that mirrors its subject. The prose is clean and propulsive, but laced with imagery that lingers — a parking lot full of junk painted rose by a dying sunset, a one-eyed cat watching like a monarch from his rusted throne, the mechanical sigh of a ventilator standing in for a friend’s stolen breath. Unger has always been a polished stylist, but here she seems to be having particular fun with the contrasts between domestic beauty and underlying menace.
The pacing is mostly excellent, particularly in the first two-thirds where the mysteries multiply faster than anyone can process them. Each chapter ending lands like a small detonation, pulling you forward through the rotating perspectives with genuine urgency.
Where the Recipe Could Use Adjustment
No thriller is without its rough edges, and Served Him Right by Lisa Unger has a few worth noting.
- The middle section occasionally overstuffs its plate. With so many narrators and subplots running simultaneously — the murder investigation, Iggy’s poisoning, the internal politics of The Cove, the family dynamics, the romantic tension — there are stretches where the pacing slackens under the weight of competing threads. A tighter middle act would have sharpened the overall impact.
- Some character decisions strain credulity. Certain choices characters make in the heat of critical moments feel engineered for dramatic effect rather than organic to who they are. The book asks us to accept a few leaps in logic that, while not dealbreakers, momentarily pull you out of the otherwise immersive world.
- The resolution, while satisfying, wraps a few threads almost too neatly. After spending three hundred pages revelling in moral ambiguity and the impossibility of clean justice, the final act occasionally veers toward tidiness that doesn’t quite match the messy, complicated tone the rest of the novel establishes so well.
These are measured criticisms of a book that succeeds far more than it stumbles. Unger’s command of suspense and her eye for the power dynamics between women carry the narrative through any rough patches with confidence and style.
What Stays With You
At its core, Served Him Right by Lisa Unger is a novel about what women owe each other and what they are willing to do when the systems designed to protect them fail. It is about sisters who know each other’s worst secrets and love each other anyway. It is about friendships that survive betrayal, and about the ancient, uncomfortable truth that sometimes justice and violence share the same root.
Unger has written a thriller that respects its audience enough to offer genuine complexity alongside its twists — and there are plenty of twists, each one earning its place in the architecture of the story. The book trusts readers to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to root for flawed women making questionable choices, and to understand that the line between protector and predator is drawn differently depending on where you stand.
If You Loved This, Read Next
For readers who savour the dark chemistry of Served Him Right by Lisa Unger, the following titles offer similarly compelling territory:
- The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine — domestic deception where no woman is quite who she appears
- The Maid by Nita Prose — a mystery wrapped in social observation and an unconventional heroine
- In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead — a reunion that unearths buried violence among friends
- My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing — a couple’s dark partnership that questions the nature of complicity
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia — women, poison, and the botanical world deployed as gothic weapon
- The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo — female herbalist knowledge as both salvation and threat in a historical setting
