The Trump administration's premier power couple is a study in arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in this caustic exposé. Huffington Post writer Ward (The Liar's Ball) paints First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both top advisers to President Trump, as poster-kids of overentitled, ethically dubious wealth. Ivanka, Ward reports, is "talented at telling self-serving bald lies" by posing as a moderate while doing little to rein in Trump's excesses; she was, he writes, neck-deep in Trump Organization deals with shady foreign investors, then exploited her presidential access to get advantages for her fashion business from foreign governments. Kushner, Ward contends, is awash in rules violations, such as failing to report meetings with Russian officials, and trades on his far-reaching government influence to get foreign investments for his family's real estate business. (Ward credits his interference in Middle East policy, motivated by a desire to wring investments from oil monarchies, with almost starting a war in the Persian Gulf.) Ward's rehash of the "Javanka" saga is well-researched but not well-presented; it's an eye-glazing maze of small-to-middling improprieties, with the thread often getting lost in the chaos of White House power plays and backstabbing. Still, Ward offers a useful, though dispiriting, guide to the ascendance of private business over the public interest in the Trump administration. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A dishy, skeptical portrait of Jared Kushner, the naive, overleveraged, and conflict-mired developer's son who has Donald Trump's ear.Intermittently, anyway. A running theme of investigative reporter Ward's (The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons, 2014, etc.) book is that the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka is so clumsily meddling that the president keeps him at arm's length. "Get rid of my kids, get them back to New York," Trump reportedly said of "Javanka" six months into his administration, after their presence became like sticky tar in the West Wing. How did Kushner, with no political or foreign policy experience, become the White House's point person on corporate innovation and peace in the Middle East? Thereon hangs a tail of greed, incompetence, desperation, and felonious behavior. Jared's father, Charlie, was a mercurial New Jersey developer who wasn't above tax fraud and blackmail to get ahead. (He was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005.) Jared was key to restoring the family's good name, which entailed a role in the family real estate business, though he "was hardly ever in the office"; a job as publisher of the New York Observer, though journalism baffled him; and his marrying Ivanka, another scion of a developer with a dodgy history. When Jared doesn't seem out of his depth, he seems corrupt; much of Ward's story turns on his disreputable dealings with Saudi and Qatari leaders, perhaps pursued in hopes of covering the $1.2 billion mortgage on a Manhattan Kushner property. Many details here have been previously reported, and the author's efforts to elevate the book above a clip job rest mainly on a raft of juicy quotes delivered by anonymous sources. ("Jared is as sinister as Donald Trump," intones a "business associate.") As a portrait of Jared's character, the book's fiendish aura is hard to trust, but given the factual record, it's not out of bounds.A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law, even setting its gossipy parts aside. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.