Scarpetta S2: Everything we know after that Amazon Prime cliffhanger

Patrick, with the release of the first season of Amazon Prime’s Scarpetta, fans are dying to know what’s ahead for Kay, Dorothy, Pete, Benton, and Lucy, especially after that cliffhanger finale.

The upcoming second season, which is currently in production, will be based on Patricia Cornwell’s fourth and fifth books in the Scarpetta series, Cruel and Unusual (1993) and The Body Farm (1994).

Liz Sarnoff told The Hollywood Reporter, “So the stories definitely start to pick up, and murders happen. Cruel and Unusual,  set in the past, is a story that involves a prisoner who’s executed, so it gives us a different setting to roll into at the top of the season”.

In the finale, spoiler alert! Kay (Nicole Kidman) takes out the present-day serial killer, a police officer she’s worked alongside since 1998, when he breaks into her home. In the aftermath, a mysterious person opens her front door and becomes a witness to the bloodshed.

Who is it? Only “the writers know,” says Sarnoff.

But fans of the show have certainly seen this person before and will learn their identity when the second season picks up “pretty soon after the events of episode 8 in present day. In the past, it picked up a little bit later.”

The emotional storytelling is the “key to the present”, adds Sarnoff. In the finale, Kay finds herself alone: her sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis) and brother-in-law Pete (Bobby Cannavale) moved out of Kay’s home and into a hotel; her niece Lucy (Ariana DeBose) suspects she “killed” the AI bot of her deceased wife Janet; and her husband Benton (Simon Baker) wants a divorce.

“I think next season is more for the present-day characters, what their journey is like without each other to some degree, because they’ve all split,” continued Sarnoff. “So the question is: Do they end up getting back together? Do those splits hold, and who really is right for whom? It’s an exploration for them more on their own at the top of the season before they’re all brought back together.”

Technically, the two Scarpetta books guiding Season 2 are set in the past, a departure from Season 1, which straddled two timelines borrowed from Cornwell’s Postmortem (the first Scarpetta book) and 2021’s Autopsy. Sound confusing? Luckily, Sarnoff has read the entire 29-book series multiple times.