Scarpetta (Prime Video)

Which fearless casting agent was brave enough to tell Nicole Kidman, ‘We need to find someone who looks like you… but younger’?

That must have been a very awkward conversation.

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Ms K’s unique quality is that she’s supposedly ageless. At 58, she uses every wile to stay just as she was in the late 1990s, when she starred with then-husband Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut.

But in the blood-drenched crime thriller Scarpetta, Nicole plays the older, modern-day version of her character – while in a separate timeline, Rosy McEwen plays her 28 years ago.

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Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis star in Scarpetta, based on the books written by Patricia Cornwell

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If you haven’t read the novels, beginning with Postmortem in 1990, be warned that you’ll need a strong stomach… especially for this adaptation

It must have been co-producer Jamie Lee Curtis who won her round. Curtis bought the rights to the books four years ago, and co-stars as her frenetic, selfish sister, Dottie.

The two have screaming rows, unleashing so much pent-up tension that the rest of the cast are blown off the screen.

Kay Scarpetta is such a strong character that it’s extraordinary the books, by crime queen Patricia Cornwell, have never been adapted for film or television before.

It’s not for want of trying – Helen Mirren, Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie have previously been lined up for the role but Cornwell (notoriously defensive about her work) always felt ‘the script never worked’.

If you haven’t read the novels, beginning with Postmortem in 1990, be warned that you’ll need a strong stomach… especially for this adaptation, which begins with close-ups of a naked female corpse, trussed and bloodied by a railway track.

Before long, the cadaver is stretched out in Scarpetta’s pathology lab, and Nicole is up to her elbows as she hauls out organs, like a game of Operation played with real body parts.

You don’t want to know what she does with her giant secateurs, but it makes Dr Nikki in Silent Witness look like Miss Marple.

Kidman is relishing the gore. ‘I literally can do an autopsy!’ she has said. ‘I’m not squeamish. I’m the daughter of a doctor and a nurse. I loved putting on the scrubs and I loved putting on the gloves.’

This scene is shown on a split screen, with Young Scarpetta on the left and Still-Young-And-Definitely-Not-Old Scarpetta on the right – both of them dissecting murder victims. This job, it’s clear, has been her lifelong passion.

‘Death is all I’ve thought about since I was 11,’ Scarpetta says, before a flashback shows her as a child, cowering in her family’s delicatessen as armed robbers raid the till and shoot her father.

Serial killers are her stock-in-trade, but the clever twist in this adaptation is that the first one she sent to jail, thanks to her genius as a forensics specialist, now appears to have been innocent.

To protect her reputation, she has to prove she caught the right man… and solve a fresh spate of murders with the same brutal hallmarks.

The backstory is confusing for the first hour, but it’s well worth persevering until the pieces fall into place.

Cornwell was the first crime writer to focus heavily on serial killers and autopsies, and she’s been widely copied ever since. It seems unfair that, because this adaptation has taken so long to happen, her key themes now look a little hackneyed.

And it’s really quite strange to see the paraphernalia of the Nineties – the hairstyles, the suits, the cars, the computers, the landlines and faxes – recreated as period dressing.

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Kay Scarpetta is such a strong character that it’s extraordinary the books, by crime queen Patricia Cornwell, have never been adapted for film or television

So much great TV from that decade, such as The Sopranos or ER, has scarcely dated and still feels relevant now, that I’m not ready for the era to become costume drama.

The murders, ancient and modern, take second place to the constant warring between Kay and Dottie.

They have their first stand-up row in a cemetery, while Dottie’s grieving daughter Lucy (Ariana DeBose) sobs beside the gravestone of her late wife.

The sisters start off bickering like children, arguing about the words of a half-remembered childhood song, before calling each other ‘weirdo’, and each claiming to be ‘the normal one’.

‘Just because you have a lot of money, it does not make you normal,’ screams Kay.

‘Oh! Actually, first of all,’ Dottie retorts, ‘yes it does. And second, it really bugs you that I have money.’

Even when Lucy pleads with them to be quiet, they can’t stop. Not that computer geek Lucy has much claim to normality either.

She’s created an AI version of her dead wife and spends hours every day chatting to it.

‘She is talking to a fricking ghost!’ howls Jamie Lee, who doesn’t just have the best lines but the best costumes too – glamming up for a birthday party Lucy doesn’t want, in a sequined dress with a plunging neckline, curly-toed elf boots and earrings that flash on and off.

Cue another titanic row with her sister. ‘You are a vain, shallow, male-addicted narcissist,’ bellows Kay, ‘who has never seen a mirror she didn’t like!’

We can’t print here what Dottie yells back. I can only say it’s the sort of language Nicole might use if she ever discovered a wrinkle.