Rating: 
Summary: ENTERTAINING, FAST PACED, GRISHAM LIKE.
Review: NOT bad, not heavy, but good quick reading. I like some of the insight into the court and the banter between roomates was great.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible
Review: I read the back cover and thought it sounded great. What a disappointment! The dialog made the characters appear as junior high students rather than young adults striving for success in Washington, D.C. The plot dragged along at an agonizing pace. Except for a few brief scenes, I found his effort to be lacking.
Rating:
Summary: One star is too high for this work.
Review: One of the few books I have not finished. I struggled through the first few chapters and found the plot and characters purely unbelievable. In general, the book is very poorly written, and blessed with a simply stupid plot. A major problem is with the dialog...people do not talk as he writes, and there is far too much dialog to keep a reader on track. Hard to believe the author is a college graduate. The author should stick to lawyering and give up writing. Don't waste your money on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Finally a Generation X Grisham...
Review: As a 22 year-old pre-law student, John Grisham's novels are entertaining and informative, but I can't relate to any of his characters. It was such a relief to finally read a "legal thriller" with characters I could picture having coffee with. Although the ending was a little weak (it should have ended 100 pages earlier), Meltzer made an excellent debut.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Imagine yourself in the following unfortunate predicament: you're stuck in the middle seat of a crowded airplane, in between two sweaty men of substantial girth, your flight starts doing one of those circling affairs three thousand feet from the airport due to bad weather, and the flight attendant announces that landing will not occur at any time in the foreseeable future. Then, perhaps, this would be a good book to pull out of your briefcase to read. Otherwise, be prepared to hit your head on the wall in absolute rage for having wasted a few hours of your life on a pretty poor piece of writing. Brad Meltzer's first book is a "thriller" that occasionally borders on being interesting. However, his execution - particularly the dialogue - leaves much to be desired. The strained and unrealistic dialogue not only reeks of "fraternal antics" (in the author's own words), but I can find no other way to characterize the discourse than to simply say ! ! that it sounds phony. Perhaps that is how boys converse in that self-contained universe (which I am not privy to) called a college fraternity? Not in the real world, though, as far as I know. The Tenth Justice is the story of Ben Addison, Yale Law School graduate and the new clerk in the chambers of Supreme Court Justice Mason Hollis, and the incredible mess he gets himself into with a con man Rick Fagen. When Addison finally realizes his blunder, he sets out on a grand chase of the ever-illusive Fagen, with the help of his co-clerk, Lisa, and his three roommates, who work at a Senator's office, the State Department, and a major Washington newspaper. These five brilliant young minds with "inside the beltway" elite status put their bright futures and, eventually, their lives, on the line for this search. The result of this cat-and-mouse chase is highly predictable - after all, the Tenth Justice is now being made into a Hollywood movie, coming soon to a thea! ! ter near you. In fact, weren't movie rights to the book s! old even before it was completed? Even to the untrained eye, it seems obvious that Meltzer wrote the story to Hollywood specifications. The Tenth Justice is not totally devoid of redeeming qualities, though. As I mentioned earlier, the story has its moments, and Meltzer (fortunately) takes you through it as though he were driving full speed down the Autobahn. If nothing, it can provide a few hours of mindless entertainment, a last resort if you are in an absolute bind, i.e., stuck in the middle seat in between two sweaty men . . . . By the way, I think it would be a pretty serious violation of the Truth-in-Advertising laws to call the Tenth Justice a "legal thriller." There is very little about the law in this book, except perhaps some information about the process by which Supreme Court hands down decisions. And even that doesn't seem quite accurate. Thriller? Well maybe. But legal it's certainly not. Then again that's probably for the better.
Rating:
Summary: The Hardy Boys at the Supreme Court
Review: Did I make a mistake and pick up a book from the juvenile section? How many sentences in the book do you think started with the phrase "The three friends went" or something equally simple. I finished this book only because I hate spending money on one and then not finishing. I gave the book to one of my Malaysian friends who speak English as a second language figuring they would have no trouble at all following the simple plot and dialogue.
Rating:
Summary: More holes than a hunk of swiss cheese
Review: You'll spend the entire book wondering why "He just doesn't...." Of course if he had, all those trees wouldn't have died to make the pages of this atrocious effort.
Rating:
Summary: John Grisham in the real world
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed The Tenth Justice. It was so refreshing to read a novel where the characters are believable and not Supermen with a law degree. And it was also informative - I really feel like I have a new perspective on how the Supreme Court operates. (Whether or not it's accurate, I can't say!) The story kept me hooked and I just couldn't figure out how the author was going to resolve the conflict, but the book came to a very satisfying resolution.
Rating:
Summary: not worth the (discounted) cost
Review: Poorly developed, childish, churlish protagonist, a one-dimensional villain, and deus ex machina solutions to the plot twists. Probably of interest to attorneys inside the beltway for its amattering of superficial supreme court lore; hard to imagine its interest to others. The characters are unpleasant, the climax dis-satisfying...it reads like a screenplay adapted as a novel, and that is likely where it is bound.
Rating:
Summary: Profoundly stupid, yet vapid
Review: This is the book John Grisham could have written in Junior High, or Scott Turrow might write after a full-frontal lobodomy. The dialog has more corn than Iowa; the plot twists are as surprising as a dishwasher manual. It is truely a "page turner" in the tradition of Fun with Dick and Jane.
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