For those who haven’t read the previous five books of The Potteriad, I'll fill you in. In Book One, Hagrid appears to a young orphan named Harry and tells him that he has Great Expectations. In Book Two, Are you there, God, it's Me, Hermione, the kids go through puberty. In Book Three, they're marooned on a desert island and the teachers are killed and Draco starts calling Neville "Piggy." In Book Four, they explore the effects of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon magnolias. In Book Five, Ron, distraught over the death of his younger brother Allie, leaves Hogwarts to drop in on his sister Ginny in New York.

That brings us to Book Six, in which (amongst other things, most of which involve hot teen sex) Dumbledore and Harry explore Voldemort’s past life through magically-recorded memories that are only available in PAL format and learn that he divided his soul into seven parts, which he has hidden in incredibly arcane and dangerous magical objects. These objects can only be created through vile Dark magic and which are known as Horcruxes (Horcruxi?), and will be available for purchase with a Happy Meal at McDonald's once the movie comes out.

On a mission to recover one of these whore-curse things from a cave that is in no way a Freudian symbol and in which Harry doesn't meet Darth Vader at all, Dumbledore is gravely weakened by being forced to drink a magic potion in a fraternity initation gone horribly wrong. Returning to Hogwart’s School of Culinary Arts and Auto Repair, Harry and Dumbledore learn that the castle has been infiltrated by a commando team of Voldemort’s Death Eaters. The weakened Dumbledore is disarmed by Draco Malfoy, who’s gone over to the Dark Side, and then finished off by Severus Snape, the Potions master who Harry never trusted but who Dumbledore faithfully stood by even though everyone could tell that he was running a meth lab out of the dungeon.

Ironically, we find out that the Horcrux that Dumbledore and Harry recovered, and which was the proximate cause of Dumbledore’s death, is a fake, planted by a mysterious “R.A.B.” The book ends with Dumbledore’s funeral, Hermione dying in childbirth, and Harry being transformed into a mechanical monstrosity swearing revenge.

We already know Book Seven will include Bill and Fleur’s wedding and a visit to the Dursley's in which Aunt Petunia will somehow be outed as a latent witch—Rowling has already said one character will exhibit unexpected powers, and remember how she knew about the Dementors?

The rest of Book 7 is tied up with the mysterious R.A.B. who stole the Horcrux, and who is no doubt Sirius Black’s younger brother Rigelus, former Death Eater and present-day corpse. As you may recall, Harry caught that sneak-thief Mundungus carrying off everything not nailed down in the Black house—which, we may be able to assume, unwittingly included the locket-horcrux. Book Seven will also likely include a visit to Mundungus in prison to find out where the real locket/horcrux is. Using it, Harry, Ron and Hermione will probably be able to find the other Horcruxes are—like attracts like, after all, which is how nerds mate. (Jeez, don't you people read Cornelius Agrippa?!)

Next question: Is Dumbledore really dead? ‘Fraid so. Yet, we wouldn’t rule out his pulling an Obi-Wan, returning from beyond the grave (remember the phoenix jetting from his tomb?). The answer to this, however, is intimately tied up with the next question: Is Snape really a traitor?

We doubt it. In every previous Harry Potter book, there’s been an elaborate plot, and things were never the way Harry and his friends thought they were: Snape wasn’t trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone; Hagrid didn’t open the Chamber of Secrets; Sirius Black wasn’t evil; Mad-Eye Moony didn't rape sheep, etc. The attentive reader always found out that Rowling had dropped clues throughout the book that only made sense in retrospect—Herminone’s cat trying to get Scabbers the Rat, for instance. Yet, in Half-Blood Prince, the nefarious plot was EXACTLY what it seemed. Instead of the plot being revealed in the course of one book (it was getting pretty repetitive...), Rowling threw us a for a loop by stretching it to two books.

Or was it? Dumbledore knew of Malfoy’s plan, and therefore Snape’s oath to help him—after all, he (inexplicably to us at least), completely trusted Snape. Dumbledore, doubtlessly, had something up his sleeve—something that involved his own death as part of the plan. His pleading on the roof was not asking Snape not to kill him, but rather to not break his Unbreakable Vow and follow through with the plan; why else would he paralyze Harry in order to keep him from interfering? He knew what was going to happen.

Which brings us to what Snape’s role is going to be in this strategy. Snape is a bit of an enigma: He looks foul, but he fights for the fair. He’s been a legimens and oculmens since the first book (in which Harry had the idea that he could “read his mind,” though we’ll never know how he didn’t find out it was Harry who chucked the firework in Chamber of Secrets to distract him so that Hermione could grab the ingredients for the Polyjuice Potion). With his abilities and Slytherin qualifications, Snape is perhaps the only person able to be a double-agent Death Eater. Harry, though brave, simply isn’t strong enough to kill Voldemort. In fact, no one is, save by ambush or sneak attack. And if anyone could get close enough to do that, it’s double-agent Snape—and what better way to gain his trust than by killing Dumbledore?

One also wonders what the role of Neville, Harry’s foil, in all of this will be... but that’s the subject of another article.