In the summer murder mystery “Sharp Objects,” premiering July 8​ on HBO, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is a newspaper reporter who is sent to Wind Gap, Mo., to write about the disappearance and murder of two teenage girls.

Camille has every reason to turn down the assignment. She grew up in Wind Gap, a small town best seen in the rearview mirror of her beat-up car. But she accepts the job, chugging enormous quantities of booze while she prepares to come face to face with memories — and people — she’d rather forget.

Chief among these is her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), a spooky, soft-spoken woman who lives in a blue Victorian mansion with crypt lighting. Adora is a Southern genteel throwback — a combination of Amanda Wingfield and Norma Desmond — who actually keeps a full-time black servant.

Camille’s presence reminds her of the daughter she lost — Camille’s sister, Marian, a disappearance that echoes the fates of the missing girls. As Camille begins to ask questions about them, Adora tries to suppress her efforts to do her job. What secret is Mom keeping?

While last summer’s wildly popular “Big Little Lies” lured viewers with the fantasy of living in ridiculously large homes on California’s Big Sur/Monterey coastline, “Sharp Objects” never strives for glamour. Wind Gap is the town that time forgot, a place where former cheerleaders on the wrong side of 40 drown their sorrows with a large pour of Sauvignon Blanc in the afternoon.

It’s going to take an outsider to crack the case, but Richard Willis (Chris Messina), a Kansas City detective sent to investigate the murders, can’t make any headway. When he realizes that no one in town wants to talk about the crimes, he tries to get Camille to share what she knows and concludes that she may be Wind Gap’s biggest mystery of all.

Like many characters in Gothic mysteries, Camille has demons, and they’re carved all over her body — words like “vanish” and “scared” that she once carved into her flesh years and years ago. The scars connect across her torso like a psychological crossword puzzle, and on the few occasions her body is not completely covered, viewers get a glimpse of how these words continue to torment her.

As she tells Willis, “My demons are not remotely tackled. They’re just mildly concussed.”

“Sharp Objects” is directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, written by Marti Noxon and based on a novel by Gillian Flynn of “Gone Girl” fame, and here she throws one red herring after another at the viewer as she brings Willis closer to the true story behind Marian’s disappearance, Camille’s cutting and who killed the teenage girls of Wind Gap.

Unlike “Big Little Lies,” whose big reveal you could see a mile away, Flynn knows how to string you along.