There is something deeply unsettling about a meal prepared with love that might also be prepared with intent to kill. Lisa Unger understands this tension instinctively, and in Served Him Right by Lisa Unger, she transforms a simple Sunday brunch into a pressure cooker of buried grudges, ancient botanical knowledge, and the kind of female rage that has been simmering for centuries. This is a thriller that wears the mask of a domestic drama, and by the time you realize what you are really consuming, it is already too late.
When Brunch Becomes a Crime Scene
The setup is deceptively simple. Ana Blacksmith has gathered her closest friends and her older sister Vera for a girls’ brunch, ostensibly to perform an “ex-orcism,” a cathartic digital purge of her recently departed boyfriend, Paul Hayes. Champagne is poured. Cassoulet is served. Place cards are arranged with Vera’s characteristic precision. But before the mimosas go flat, police arrive at the door with devastating news: Paul is dead, his body discovered in a shallow grave at Black River Park, and foul play is suspected.
Within hours, Ana’s best friend Iggy collapses and falls into a coma.
From this double blow, Unger unfolds a narrative that moves with the deliberate, gathering momentum of a slow-acting toxin. The investigation spreads outward like roots beneath soil, pulling up secrets that every character at that table would prefer stayed buried.
A Feast of Rotating Perspectives
One of the defining structural choices in Served Him Right by Lisa Unger is its rotating point-of-view chapters, each named for the character holding the lens. We hear from Ana, Vera, Iggy, Detective Timothy Bandeau, Vera’s teenage daughter Coraline, and their Aunt Agnes in interspersed flashback chapters that illuminate how the Blacksmith sisters arrived at this moment.
This multi-perspective approach delivers several rewards:
- Unreliable intimacy — Each narrator shares just enough to make you trust them, and withholds just enough to make that trust feel precarious
- Layered revelations — What one character conceals, another inadvertently exposes, creating a constant drip of new information
- Competing sympathies — Unger makes it genuinely difficult to choose sides because every woman at the table has her own justified grievance
The Agnes chapters deserve particular attention. Set years earlier, they trace the orphaned sisters’ arrival at their aunt’s remote estate and their education in “The Knowledge,” an inherited botanical practice encompassing both healing and something far more dangerous. These sections carry the weight of fairy tale and myth, providing the novel’s thematic spine while explaining how ordinary women become capable of extraordinary and terrifying things.
The Architecture of Female Rage
At its core, this is a novel about what happens when the systems designed to protect women fail them completely. Paul Hayes is not merely a bad boyfriend. He is a serial predator who drugged and assaulted his assistant Jessica, psychologically terrorized colleagues, committed fraud, and weaponized his charm and wealth to escape every consequence. The prologue, narrated from Jessica’s perspective, is a masterclass in quiet horror, depicting the mechanics of workplace assault with the kind of clinical precision that makes your stomach turn.
Unger is too sophisticated a writer to present her characters’ responses as simple or morally clean. The women of “The Cove,” a self-governing network of herbalists and healers with roots stretching back generations, operate outside the law because the law has never operated for them. Their justice is ancient, botanical, and irreversible. But whether that constitutes justice or vengeance is a question the novel asks without fully answering, which is entirely to its credit.
What Makes the Rage Feel Earned
The book refuses to let Paul exist as a one-dimensional villain. Through scattered accounts from different characters, he accumulates into something worse than a monster: a plausible one. The kind of man who brings his assistant an oat milk latte in the morning and assaults her that same evening. This specificity makes the female anger in the novel feel not only justified but inevitable.
The Prose: Sharp Enough to Cut
Unger’s writing mirrors the toxins at the heart of her story: smooth going down, with a delayed and devastating kick. Her sentences are lean and propulsive, rarely drawing attention to themselves but consistently doing precise work. Ana’s chapters carry a sardonic edge and restless energy, opening with her prowling a roadside bar in heels to meet a stranger from a hookup app. Vera’s sections are cooler, more controlled, reflecting a woman who has built her entire life around the principle that order keeps chaos at bay. The contrast between sisters drives much of the novel’s internal tension.
The food metaphors are handled with particular care. The novel’s three-part structure borrows from the language of dining itself:
- Part One: Amuse-bouche — Small, appetizing morsels of character and setup
- Part Two: Eating Crow — The bitter middle course where consequences arrive
- Part Three: Just Desserts — A final act where justice, sweet and otherwise, is served
This framework elevates what could have been a gimmick into something organic, reinforcing the novel’s central obsession with the thin line between nourishment and poison, between medicine and murder.
Where the Recipe Falters
For all its pleasures, Served Him Right by Lisa Unger is not without its imperfections. The detective, Timothy Bandeau, serves a crucial narrative function as both investigator and love interest, but his chapters occasionally feel like they belong to a more conventional procedural. His internal monologues about the state of policing in a small underfunded town, while socially aware, can slow the pacing during the novel’s middle section when momentum matters most.
The romance between Ana and Timothy also strains credulity. Their bathroom hookup before the investigation begins is a bold narrative choice, and the resulting conflict of interest creates genuine tension. But the novel asks us to accept this as something more than attraction, something fated. Given that the book is otherwise so clear-eyed about the way women romanticize dangerous men, Ana’s willingness to trust a detective investigating her for murder because “he feels familiar” reads as slightly under-examined.
Additionally, while the rotating perspectives mostly enrich the narrative, certain voices receive thinner treatment. Coraline’s late-novel emergence as a key player feels somewhat rushed, her competence arriving almost fully formed rather than earned through the earlier chapters. A few more pages establishing her relationship with The Knowledge would have made her climactic intervention land with even greater force.
Unger’s Ongoing Mastery of Domestic Suspense
Lisa Unger has built a formidable career exploring the darkness that hides inside seemingly comfortable lives. From the claustrophobic paranoia of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six to the identity-fracturing tension of Confessions on the 7:45 and the unsettling neighborly dynamics of The New Couple in 5B, she has consistently demonstrated an ability to find the threat lurking within the familiar. Served Him Right by Lisa Unger represents a meaningful expansion of her range, incorporating elements of magical realism and generational saga into her established thriller framework without losing the propulsive readability that defines her work.
The Verdict: A Slow Poison Worth Taking
Served Him Right by Lisa Unger is a fiercely entertaining, morally complex thriller that trusts its readers to sit with uncomfortable questions about justice, complicity, and the lengths to which women will go when every legitimate avenue of recourse has been exhausted. It is a novel that will satisfy genre fans with its twists and misdirections while offering something richer underneath: a genuine interrogation of power, who wields it, and what happens when those denied it for too long finally reach for the most ancient tools available.
It is not a perfect novel. Its middle sags slightly under the weight of its many moving parts, and a couple of character arcs would benefit from more room to breathe. But when the final course is served, when the full picture of what actually happened at that brunch and in the months surrounding it snaps into focus, the satisfaction is considerable.
If You Enjoyed This, Try These
If the blend of female solidarity, botanical menace, and layered suspense in Served Him Right by Lisa Unger left you hungry for more, consider these comparable reads:
- The It Girl by Ruth Ware — A past crime among close friends resurfaces with lethal consequences
- The Maid by Nita Prose — An unconventional heroine navigates a world of hidden cruelty and quiet justice
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia — Gothic atmosphere meets feminine defiance and poisonous botanical secrets
- The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine — A revenge plot dressed in designer clothing, with twists that redefine every relationship
- Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty — The brunch-to-crime-scene pipeline, perfected with dark humor and sharp social commentary
- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson — For readers drawn to the novel’s undercurrent of female lineage and inherited darkness