No airline crash in recent years attracted more worldwide attention than that of TWA Flight 800.

It was not just that some 236 people were killed on the flight minutes after it left John F. Kennedy Airport bound for Paris early on the evening of July 17, 1996 --- the plane had seemingly exploded in midair for no immediately obvious reason. Such things simply were not supposed to happen.

Within days the conspiracy theorists were in full cry. An onboard bomb, said some; a ground-fired missile, said others. But to the professional investigators whose job it was to find the real cause, the answer soon became obvious: An explosion in the giant aircraft's nearly empty center fuel tank had somehow been triggered, tearing the plane apart in seconds.

Christine Negroni, an experienced television journalist whose specialty is aviation, has told the whole story in this absorbing book. It is not a long book but it manages to weave together satisfactorily several different stories in more than adequate detail.

In prose that combines crispness with an obvious sense of fairness, she tells the personal stories of many passengers and crew members --- who they were and how they happened to be on the doomed airplane. Another strand of her story follows the fierce turf battle among the investigators, mainly that between the conspiracy-minded FBI and the more technically oriented National Transportation Safety Board. Their squabbling eventually involved the White House itself in keeping the investigation on track.

Another story splendidly told is that of the rescue crews who had the grisly task of recovering wreckage and body parts from the waters of Long Island Sound. And Negroni is eloquent on the ordeal of the relatives who gathered near the crash scene, hoping for some explanation or at least for recovery of the bodies of their loved ones. They were understandably impatient with the slow pace of the investigation and anxious to shift the effort toward recovery of bodies. They were also, of course, relentlessly stalked by the p ress, whose presence numbered in the thousands in the days following the crash.

Negroni pieces together the story through scores of interviews and a thorough examination of the investigatory paper trail. Unlike many authors of such books, she is careful to distinguish between verified direct quotations and remarks that can only be imagined under the circumstances. Her writing is journalistic without being sensational. She does not use the printed page as an oratorical soapbox, preferring to make her indictment of the industry in understated but no less damning prose.

Negroni is obviously distressed by what she sees as the FBI's immediate and groundless rush to find a terrorist conspiracy in the disaster; her sympathies clearly lie with the less glamorous "tin kickers" of the Safety Board. In fact, she dismisses the conspiracy theorists, the most prominent of whom was former Kennedy administration spokesman Pierre Salinger. Her cast of characters is large and varied, but many of its members come alive as pe rsonalities thanks to her journalistic skills. There are heroes here, but there are also self-serving operators and ax-grinders aplenty.

There is a technical side to Negroni's book, explaining how and why the near-empty tank filled with gasoline vapors was a bomb waiting to go off, and she explores the aircraft industry's culpability in the disaster as well. Her conclusion is chilling: The industry had known about this problem for many years. Such explosions had happened before but nothing was done about the situation because addressing it would cost too much: "When the cost outweighs the benefit, certain hazards are considered an acceptable risk."

It's enough to make you cash in your airline tickets.