‘Sharp Objects’ looks like a top series, but is it?

memory and momentum), and most of all, the right star – Amy Adams, who is always at home portraying damaged-goods characters who live in the muggy melancholia of the American elsewhere.

Adams plays Camille Preaker, a St Louis newspaper reporter with a heavy drinking problem, whose sympathetic but demanding editor, Curry (Miguel Sandoval), assigns her to travel back to her home town of Wind Gap (population 2 000) to look into the murder of young, local girl and the recent disappearance of another.

Does Wind Gap have a serial killer? Camille, who hasn’t visited home in years, protests the pitch; even if the story’s good, it won’t win her a Pulitzer.

“You’re not winning a Pulitzer because you’re only half-good at writing,” Curry tells her. (Yeowch!)

“This could change that. And I’m your boss.”

In addition to bringing as many travel-size bottles of vodka as she can fit in a shoulder bag, Camille arrives in Wind Gap with an almost insurmountable amount of emotional baggage, revealed fleetingly in Vallée’s dribs-’n’-drabs technique.

The sight of girls lazily roller-skating reminds Camille of her little sister, who died of an illness 25 years ago.

After telling the unhelpful police chief (Matt Craven) of her MURDER COMES TO TOWN: Patr