(FORTUNE Magazine) – Forget the dozens of previously published pretenders. With S&L Hell: The People and the Politics Behind the $1 Trillion Savings and Loan Scandal (W.W. Norton, $24.95), Kathleen Day delivers the definitive book on the greatest financial fiasco of the age. Day covered the savings and loan industry for the Washington Post in the late 1980s, as time and temperature signs went dark from one coast to the other, and her story is rich in the kind of detail only beat reporters accumulate. She is reluctant to cast moral judgments, letting those details speak for themselves -- which they do, at high decibels. ''It is,'' she writes with typical understatement, ''a history sadly lacking heroes.'' But what it lacks in heroes it makes up for in extravagant characters worthy of a comic novel: white-belt-and-shoe Babbitts from the sticks, nincompoop regulators, Washington pols oily with public rectitude and private avarice. Let us call the roll: -- Fernand St Germain, chairman of the House Banking Committee, self-defined ''consumer advocate'' and a prodigious consumer himself -- mostly of food, drink, travel, and ''late-night entertainment'' provided by the thrift industry. The industry was well compensated by the deregulatory legislation that bore his name. -- Ed Gray, a hapless Reagan loyalist, whose sinecure as chairman of the Home Loan Bank Board became a career-ending nightmare. One week an industry shill, the next a schoolmarm regulator, he salved his wounds late at night by listening to recordings of Winston Churchill. -- Danny Faulkner, Texas thrift owner who became an exemplar of his highflying industry colleagues -- only more so. Illiterate by his own admission, he showered pals with Rolex watches and hired the Tulsa Philharmonic to play the theme from Rocky at his son's wedding. He was later convicted of looting his thrifts of $165 million. -- Stanley E. Adams, another thrift owner, who once filed an application to open a branch on the moon. Among his investments was a ''holistic'' fitness club ''where your brain learns to accept unreality as real'' -- invaluable training for anyone owning a thrift in the 1980s. There are many more, the obscure and the familiar -- Don Regan, Jake Garn, Tony Coelho, Charles Keating, even (say it ain't so!) Alan Greenspan. Their roles in the S&L debacle hold the fascination of a car wreck. Day is equally astute in dealing with the less colorful aspects of the scandal, the bizarre minuet of legislation, regulation, and deregulation that aggravated the crisis at every turn. The proximate causes are by now well understood: The high interest rates of the late 1970s and early 1980s led a pampered, regulated industry to demand new profitmaking opportunities; the simultaneous expansion of federal deposit insurance meant that those opportunities would be ever riskier. Meanwhile, deregulation let the good times roll, and a Congress well lubricated with industry dollars made sure they did. This is a sprawling, sordid tale, and Day has followed the length of every slimy tentacle. She deserves a 21-gun salute. Thanks to her book, we'll know whom to aim at when we fire.