2019.Book19 - Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Hadden)

I'm tempted to need the protagonist to have some redeeming qualities to offset his damage. And the author offers intelligence, but unconvincingly. He could go farther with primes: they're the only ints you need to remove. He gets the night sky reason wrong: it's not the stars' velocity that hides them, it's that most stars formed too far away for their light to have reached us yet. So the protagonist is unusually flawed, without compensation. Maybe that's the real bleak message.