Dr. Kay Scarpetta isn’t done tracking down killers. The brilliant forensic pathologist who has starred in 29 of Patricia Cornwell’s thrilling crime novels is now the star of her own murder-mystery series, which premiered in March 2026 and is already coming back for more.
Prime Video’s Scarpetta features Nicole Kidman as Kay alongside an A-list cast that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, Simon Baker, and Ariana DeBose. And because the season 1 story unfolded across two timelines—adapting Cornwell’s first Scarpetta novel, 1990’s Postmortem, and 2021’s Autopsy—a younger ensemble (including Rosy McEwen and Jake Cannavale) played the same characters in 1998.
Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), Kay (Nicole Kidman), and Benton (Simon Baker) in Scarpetta season 1.
Season 1 ended with two mysteries solved. In 1998, Kay, the newly installed chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, tracked down a serial killer with the help of cop Pete Marino (Jake Cannavale) and FBI profiler Benton Wesley (Hunter Parrish). (It was a 911 operator who chose his victims by the sound of their voices.) And in the present, Kay and Pete hunted down another murderer whose crime scenes resembled the ones in the 1998 case. That perpetrator winds up being a cop who was obsessed with Kay, but when he goes to her home and attacks her, she violently beats him with a baseball bat—just as someone comes to the door and catches her in the act.
Fans will have to wait to learn what comes of that cliffhanger, and what’s next for Kay Co. In the meantime, here’s everything we know about Scarpetta season 2.
Has Scarpetta' been renewed for season 2?
Yes, and it was from the start. Prime Video announced in September 2024 that Scarpetta had been given a two-season order, so the cast and creative team knew early on that a second season was already in the cards.
Like season 1, Scarpetta season 2 will be set in the present day and the '90s.
When is 'Scarpetta' season 2 coming out?
You might not be held in suspense for very long. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published around the show's initial release in March 2026, showrunner Liz Sarnoff said her writers’ room has already penned seven episodes for next season. Not only that, but filming was already underway in Nashville. According to the report, production was scheduled to continue into the summer.
With that timeline, it's possible the detective series could return to Prime Video around this same time next year. So, mark your calendars (tentatively, at least) for spring 2027.
The upcoming episodes will introduce new cases for Kay, Pete, and their teammates to solve.
Which book will 'Scarpetta' season 2 be based on?
Make that books, as in plural. Like season 1, which adapted two mystery-thriller books from Cornwell’s canon, season 2 will also weave together two Scarpetta novels.
“We do two books a season—season 1, we did Postmortem and Autopsy, and this year we’re doing Cruel and Unusual and The Body Farm,” Sarnoff explained to THR. “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.”
Published in 1993, Cruel and Unusual follows an investigation in which fingerprints belonging to an executed killer are found at another crime scene—after Kay has already performed the dead man’s autopsy.
The Body Farm, which hit bookshelves one year later, centers on Kay traveling to North Carolina to investigate the murder of an 11-year-old girl, in a case that has parallels to another investigation in Virginia.
What will 'Scarpetta' season 2 be about?
You don’t have to be an ace investigator to deduce that Scarpetta season 2 will once again unfold across both the past and present. We can assume that one book will serve as the basis for the 1998 timeline, and the other will inform the current day.
Then there are the threads we still need to pull at from season 1. Obviously, there’s the question of who caught Kay mercilessly beating Officer Ryan (David Hornsby) after he attacked her in her home. Interestingly enough, Sarnoff confirmed to THR that it’s a character we already know. Then there’s Kay’s fraught relationship with her sister, Dorothy (Curtis); her strained marriage to FBI agent Benton Wesley (Baker); and her close ties to her longtime colleague Pete (Cannavale), who is also Dorothy’s husband. We also still don’t know who pulled the plug on niece Lucy’s (Ariana DeBose) AI version of her late wife. And there’s still that mysterious cover-up of Cammie Ramada’s (Brittany Belt) murder in season 1—why was her death marked down as an accident?
Lingering mysteries, like who tampered with Lucy's (Ariana DeBose) AI wife, will continue in season 2.
“The way I sort of think about the show is that, in the past [timeline], we really embrace the procedural storytelling a little bit more and stay with the case a little bit more, and then in the present, we take some departures as far as their emotional lives and the lives of the family and all that,” Sarnoff explained in an interview with Collider. “So, we are picking up right where we left off in [the season 1 finale] in the present day at the top of season 2 to show all the mysteries we left behind, but by the end of the episode, we're fully into another case, which is a child abduction, so it's super exciting.”
Much of the lead cast, including the '90s versions of Kay (Rosy McEwen) and Pete (Jake Cannavale), should return.
Who in the 'Scarpetta' cast will be back for season 2?
Double the timelines, double the returning actors. Prime Video has confirmed that all principal cast members across both timelines will return for Scarpetta season 2. This includes Kidman, Curtis, Cannavale, Baker, and DeBose in the present; and McEwan, the younger Cannavale, Hunter Parrish (Benton), and Amanda Righetti (Dorothy) in the past.
Are there any new cast members in 'Scarpetta' season 2?
Get ready to keep track of new faces. Prime Video has revealed several actors joining Scarpetta's second season, from veteran TV star David Arquette to Cobra Kai alum William Zabka to Emmy winner Holland Taylor to even rapper Michael "Killer Mike" Render.
Other new cast members include Jodi Balfour, Kim Dickens, Troy Garity, and Jerod Haynes. The series will also continue to be a family affair; after the father-and-son Cannavales, Simon Baker's daughter Stella Baker is set to join her father on the series.
All new character details are under wraps, so we’ll have to wait to see what twists and turns are in store. In the meantime, fans have plenty of questions to turn over—and two books to pore over for clues.