My mom was a huge murder-mystery fan. She devoured the Agatha Christie novels, loved TV shows like Columbo, Perry Mason, and Murder She Wrote. So when the novel Post-Mortem was getting huge buzz, she added her name to the list at the library so she could read it. This was, of course, the debut novel featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta by author Patricia Cornwell. And thus began my mom's longtime fandom of the series. I read some of them she thought I'd enjoy, and thought they were entertaining reads.

Due to the series' early successes, Demi Moore (who was riding high off of Ghost and probably A Few Good Men) was attached to star as Scarpetta in the film adaptation. As a huge fan of her work, I was looking forward to it. Except it never happened.

Fast forward to now, and Amazon Prime has come out with a series adapting both Post-Mortem and a much later book I never read. To have that make sense, there are two different sets of actors portraying each character in each time period. Most notably, Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis as the older characters.

And despite the A-list talent and good source material, the Prime series is shit and I couldn't even get through the first episode.

First of all, the attempt at weaving together two storylines from two time periods is a failure. The connections don't really connect and the ping-pong narrative between past and present is a distracting mess. Maybe it evens out by the end, but I sincerely doubt it. I would have much rather them just adapt the complete book to let the story unfold more naturally. But the worst thing is the characterization of Scarpetta herself. Far from the analytical genius in the books, the adaptation is all about artificial drama that you'd be hard-pressed to give a crap about. Idiotic screaming fights are not what Scarpetta is about.

I never got far enough in the books to know that Lucy got married to a woman that eventually died, but I went running to the internet to find out if she created an AI of her dead wife in the books, because it seemed too randomly stupid for Patricia Cornwell to exploit. And, of course, it's not in the novels at all. Just another random attempt at padding out the source material that fails.

I know that Reacher is not 100% faithful to the books. But it still works because the character is faithful. So much so that it's almost impossible for me to read the books now without picturing Alan Ritchson in my head. The show-runners worked overtime to make sure that this was the case, which is why I love the adaptation so much. But with Scarpetta it's the exact opposite. The character is so divorced from the source material that I don't picture anybody from it in the books at all.

One of these days Hollywood is going to wake the fuck up and realize that the books they are adapting are popular for a reason. And deviating from them for whatever reason is a stupid mistake that rarely manages to improve on what people fell in love with in the first place.

But, as Scarpetta makes so vividly clear, that day is not now.