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It depends on the genre. I write mysteries, so people sometimes die. Horror-- no problem. Send 'em for s dirt nap. It's expected.
However, I have a series with a dog in it who is very old, but everyone loves the dog, so that is one canine who will never die no matter who else gets it :-).
It's tougher in romance, or in a series where a character is known and beloved. Two books I wrote dealt with the death of a spouse and they were horrible experiences because I had to go to a place of pain, to remember real loss. To this day I get heart-wrenching email from people who have lost loved ones, so I guess it evoked the right response. But I will never lightly take on such a story again and I haven't tried for sequels.
Speaking as a reader, I ditched two series (and their authors) because the authors killed off favorite characters. They violated my trust. The deaths felt capricious to me and that added to the anger at the abrupt change in dircetion of the series. I think there was a need for a new love interest and instead of having a heroine divorce, the authors offed the husbands (who were way more interesting than the leads). Knowning how pissed off I was when it happened-- a decade and hundreds of dollars for hardbacks invested in something that suddenly felt futile-- it would stay my hand until I considered every other way of making something work. If you've made a pact with your readers. you don't violate it without a good reason.
But killing characters can sometimes work even in a series. I think that both James Bond and Quiller were men in a death spiral and everyone who reads them knows there won't be a happy ending. I'd rather leave it implied than actually read about their deaths, but I think the increasingly suicidal behavior was appropriate in those stories. And self-inflicted by adrenaline junkies. They were not innocents having evil come down around them. That makes a difference for me.
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