sloan richman

mystery and crime fiction

about

Sloan Richman writes mystery and crime fiction. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Sloan now lives across the East River in Manhattan with his wife, son, and crime-solving* cat. He works as a technical writer by day, but at night, prowls the mean streets of the city looking for wrongs to write. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, both of which have been helpful in plotting murders.** Small Town Symphony (in Four Deadly Movements) is the first in the Daniel Cole/Nat Gilliam music and mystery series. His short stories, including the Detective Oswald Cox mysteries, have appeared or are forthcoming in Mystery Tribune, Big Smoke Pulp, Bright Flash Literary Review, Sci-Fi Lampoon, and The Bookends Review.

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* Note: In this context, crime=“why isn’t anyone feeding me now?” and solving=“I will bite you until you feed me.”

** plotting fictional murders. Just wanted to make that clear. Fictional. Really.

novels
Small Town Symphony (in Four Deadly Movements)

Daniel Cole is a 27-year-old musical genius whose extraordinary auditory memory allows him to hear patterns others can’t. All he wants is to finally move out of his parents’ house and into his own place, but his non-normative demeanor has an alienating effect on the people he encounters. Instead, he is labeled a “Freak” and accused of a string of burglaries at real estate open houses. With his entire future in jeopardy, he sets out to clear his name, enlisting his only friend, a mechanic with a criminal past, to assist him. But when Daniel’s unconventional investigative style, enhanced by his auditory memory and perfect pitch, uncovers otherwise overlooked musical clues, he unwittingly exposes an underbelly of corruption in this seemingly idyllic town. And with each new revelation, another body turns up, with Daniel always implicated as the prime suspect.

Enter Nat Gilliam, the small-town central New Jersey police officer tasked with the investigation. An outsider to the community himself, Gilliam empathizes with Daniel’s struggles against the snobby, narrow-minded, and judgmental villagers. Still, he can’t eliminate Daniel as a suspect. Alongside a local journalist with her own outsider status, their investigations crisscross and finally converge with the realization that Daniel’s auditory memory holds the key to unlocking the town’s sordid secrets and solving the four murders.

Stay tuned! Planned release in 2026 from Solstice Publishing.

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