calimac

When I originally read it, I thought that it was murder (since, like you, I wanted to know what happened, and so I read the last three or four chapters first). When I read the whole book, it seemed extraordinarily clear that Rowling intended this to be a mercy killing of sorts, or at least something that the person being killed WANTED done and in fact ORDERED done. YMMV. I do think that Rowling is a good storyteller in the sense that she can suck you into the world, despite authorial choices that are cliche or badly thought out, and despite plot holes that make you wince when you think about them, but you still need to know what happens. I care about the characters quite a bit, even though I recognize that they are cutouts indistinguishable from a thousand others in children's literature.