Zachary

When he's not busy with schoolwork or bar mitzvah rehearsals, 12-year-old Zachary Silver moonlights as a detective. Zach witnessed ``Big Lew'' Heinz, chief cop and anti-Semitic ogre of Oakville, Conn., stab a history teacher to death. Now the adolescent narrator-hero is helping soft-spoken Lt. Harry Roth nab Heinz and ferret out the high-ranking ex-Nazi whom Heinz may be protecting in this old industrial town, where the Silvers are practically the only Jewish family. The time is 1945, just after the war; filmmaker Pintoff wonderfully captures period details in his first novel. Zach's crush on his art teacher, who might be tied to the killer, typifies the growing pains explored in this often affecting coming-of-age novel, with its acutely realistic sociological portrait of a town but unconvincing and unsuspenseful plot. (Nov.)