Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?: What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Six Expert Harry Potter Detectives Examine the Evidenc

This book is sooo deep. I loved the analysis. Points I had not noticed, and I have read the books at least 7 times. Each essay was as good as the one before. I loved the Slughorn switching, the 'stoppered death', the misdirection and of course the exoneration of my dear Snape. These essays show exemplary detective work, and attention to detail. Loved it!!!

The Harry Potter series might be the most intricate mystery/detective story of all time. "Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?" is an excellent compilation of several authors who have carefully read the Harry Potter series, and who offer well-informed analysis of what's really going on, along with thoughts about what we'll see in the final book. WKAD is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than John Granger's previous books on Harry Potter. Here's just one example of the kind of high-end inquiry you'll find in WKAD: In the tower scene in book 6, Harry is petrified by Dumbledore. Harry sees Snape cast the AK spell at Dumbledore. Harry sees Dumbledore slowly fall off the tower. After Dumbledore hits the ground, Harry is now longer petrified. Harry figures that Dumbledore's death released the spell. But Harry must be wrong: AK kills instantly, so Harry should have been released _before_ Dumbledore started falling to the ground. Moreover, a third person can release the victim of a Petrificus spell; on the Hogwart's Express at the beginning of the school year, Draco petrified Harry, and Tonks released Harry from Draco's spell. On the tower, Harry was un-petrified just as Snape disappeared into the stairwell. And Snape, BTW, has previously shown that he can cast an area-wide spell that cancels all currently operative spells; he did this once in a class. All this suggests that what happened on the Tower may have been quite elaborately staged, and that the people who staged the event wanted to ensure that Harry saw everything. Why? Well, that's still speculative, but now you'll be speculating much closer to the heart of the mystery.

This book offers sophisticated, well documented theories and interpretations of the first six books in the Harry Potter series, particularly Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The contents are as follows: "Introduction: Fun During Interlibrum" by John Granger, "Why Half-Blood Prince is the Best Harry Potter Novel" by John Granger, "The Curse of the Black Family Tree" by Wendy B. Harte, "How Dumbledore and Slughorn Used Magic - and Stage Magic - and Fooled Us All" by Sally M. Gallo, "The Locket, the Cup, Nagini, Harry, and the Mirror of Erised" by Daniela Teo, "Welcome to My Murder, Act I" by Joyce Odell, "Brandy and Revelations in the Library" by The Usual Suspects, and "Afterword: About the Children's High-Level Group." Each of these chapters is compelling, thought-provoking reading. Perhaps the most persuasive are John Granger's essay on how Half-Blood Prince raises new questions while providing key (and unexpected) clues to answering existing mysteries from the series, and Wendy B. Harte's interpretation of the Black Family Tree and its relevance to the plot of the forthcoming final Harry Potter novel. This book is definitely worth reading for any serious fan, and it provides ample evidence of the depth, complexity, and sheer intellectual joy of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

As an serious adult fan of Harry Potter (and when I say "adult" I mean 40 + !) I've struggled to find forums for theories on what specific events in the books really mean, speculation on "what will happen next" and general appreciation of JK Rowling's writing and characters. The bulk of the online forums and published work is targeted to a much younger audience - and frankly, I've found a lot of it to be not all that interesting or well written. So I really feel like I've hit the jackpot with this new book "Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?" The book is clearly written by adults, for adults. It contains serious research, lots of thought-provoking questions, but also some juicy, fun speculation. Each contributor elaborates on their own pet theory (including what the remaining Horocruxes really are, and what was really up with the whole Tonks-Remus love affair), but in the end, they all go out on a limb with predictions about what will happen - including some bloodthristy speculation about who will die! Another kind of neat thing about the book is that theories explored don't necessarily support eachother - but they are all extremely well researched and supported with citations from "the canon" as they call it (ie, the 6 Harry Potter books to date, plus published interviews with JK Rowling), or other interesting material, like the life of a real life magician who just might be the model for Slughorn. I loved that there were two essays in the book that made the case for either an "evil" Slughorn (he was apparently up to much more than was revealed in Book 6, but in a bad way) or a "whitehat" Slughorn (he was apparently up to much more than was revealed in the book, but in a good way) - and both theories are totally plausible! Probably my favorite chapter in the book uses as its starting point a detailed Black family tree (eg, Sirius and Bellatrix et al) that JK Rowling apparently published for charity in the past year or so, and spins out an amazing theory about who the mysterious R.A.B. from Book 6 really is. (Hint: B stands for "Black"!) It's also cool that you don't have to read through whole book at one sitting (although I did) - you can dip into it, and come back after thinking about the theories (and maybe re-reading some of the books!) And since we still don't know when that Seventh book will come out - there's a lot in this book to keep you entertained and interested in the meanwhile.

Edmund Wilson once expressed his contempt for detective fiction by asking about one of Agatha Christie's books, in a wrongheaded and curmudgeonly burst of annoyance, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" And there are still no doubt those readers who find Harry Potter too juvenile, silly, trivial or marginal to care about Dumbledore or any other HP character. But people with any degree of interest at all will find this book a feast of information, speculation, and background. Just don't make it your first critical exposure to the HP series. The editor, John Granger, has previously written a couple of outstanding books on the HP series; it's worth checking them out, too, since they're perfect for beginners, whereas "Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?" which gets into nuance and presupposes familiarity with detail, is for more seasoned HP readers. Better than any other writer I know, Granger has correlated HP to wider literary influences, patterns, and sources, and, in his "Looking for God in Harry Potter," he spiritedly defended the series as a profound spiritual enactment of heroic, self-sacrificing action when it was under attack. In arguing the presence of age-old redemptive story lines and placing them in a whole context of Western culture, especially the misunderstood practice of alchemy, Granger has persuaded me (and many other readers) that the HP series -- enthralling and wonderfully entertaining as it is -- holds serious value expressed by Rowling with profound spiritual insight and consummate artistic skill. In this volume, Granger collaborates with five other HP experts to show that what we think we saw might not be the reality and to speculate with tight reasoning on detailed evidence about Rowling's crucial technique of making us believe that what we see through Harry's eyes -- limited and incomplete evidence -- is only part of the whole picture. The subtitle sets the theme: "What Really [underscore] Happened in 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?'" The key is, as Granger argues, deliberate and skillful "narrative misdirection." Other topics include Wendy B. Harte's analysis of the curse on the Black family tree, an essay rich with informed speculation about the actual role of the Black family. If only the other members were like Sirius! Have they been serving Voldemort or not? Harte's comments take us to the question of what happens in the seventh volume; none of the topics can avoid spilling over into guessing how the series must end. Sally M. Gallo shows how Dumbledore and Slughorn cooperated to create a brilliant illusion, a beautifully planned deception, just as Joyce Odell weighs the evidence that the events on the tower could be a conspiracy to mislead. What Harry witnesses may be pure stage magic. But mislead whom? and why? You have to read it to find out. Daniela Teo sets out to identify the remaining horcruxes and show how to get to them. Is Harry himself a horcrux, as so many have surmised? Read abou