“A Widow’s Game” is a Spanish “true crime” thriller that’s as dry as your average episode of “Law & Order” or its many spin-offs, and as about as thrilling.

What makes it intriguing enough to stick with is a sexually voracious and manipulative villain and the slow, deliberate and by-the-book way cops take care of business in Valencia.

There’s not much mystery to “whodunit,” so Netflix changing the title from “La viuda negra,” “The Black Widow,” was pointless. Within a couple of days of the murder, veteran National Police Chief Inspector Eva Torres (Carmen Machi) and their team are pretty damned sure they’ve got their suspect.

So what six credited Spanish screenwriters came up with to maintain our interest is telling the story in three chapters. We follow “Eva” as and her team of two (Pablo Molinero and Pepe Ocio) as they methodically work the case, face off with a bullying, press-happy police commissioner and balance this one case against others and with single mom Eva’s family life (a special needs daughter who keeps getting kicked out of schools).

We hang out with the hard working/hard-living suspect Maria Jesus or “Maje” (Ivana Baquero), the widow who doesn’t act like a widow, but through whom we meet her late husband Arturo and her assorted lovers via flashbacks.

And one last chapter reveals who the play-acting, dramatizing and manipulating 20something Maje talked into doing the deed for her.

Baquero makes our Black Widow a fascinating, sexual creature in the Nurse Jackie mold. She’s a nurse working two jobs to help pay for renovating the couple’s Valencia apartment. She feels martryed, but even if she didn’t she’d still cheat. A lot. She enjoys sex and sexual conquests and juggling her many lovers with lies and the help of friends.

But this libidinous, constantly-clubbing 27 year-old never wholly shook her strict religious upbringing in provincial Novelda.

You don’t UNDERSTAND, she breathlessly tells Eva as evidence of her serial infidelities comes to light. “Cheating in Novelda will get you KILLED!” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English).

Maje gossips with pals and texts her assorted lovers, all of it by phone. That’s how the cops come for her, and once they have judicial permission for wiretaps. We’re treated to audio montages of Maje’s lying, cheating indiscretions. But is there “evidence” in all that?

“A Widow’s Game” delivers interesting glimpses of Spanish life — Maje’s Apostolic Church upbringing (she kisses the crucifix above her marriage bed before crashing to sleep after her multiple shifts and what came after), her mother in law’s advice to Maje after she’s caught cheating right before the marriage.

“Everyone has to choose the spoon they want to eat with the rest of their lives.”

But Baquero’s vamped, self-dramatizing sexy suspect aside, “A Widow’s Game” is too tame and predictable to tantalize. The “lives” are glimpsed and glossed, not deeply probed. The suspect “who did her dirty work” is a cliche in Spain, America, pretty much anywhere men fall for the charms of a femme fatale.

“Game” thus amounts to little more than a page-turner, a beach book of a movie for those sucked into How-she-done-it and how the police come to their conclusions and make their case.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity

Cast: Carmen Machi, Ivana Baquero,
Tristán Ulloa, Pablo Molinero, Pepe Ocio and
Álex Gadea

Credits: Directed by Carlos Sedes, scripted by Ramón Campos, Gema de Neira, Jon de la Custa, Ricardo Jornet, David Orea and Javier Chacártegui. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02