Rating: 
Summary: Lousy--ignore the hype.
Review: I saw a review in "Entertainment Weekly" where the headline was a lot more enthusiastic than the review itself, it gave "Dead Even" a B-, but that's grade inflation. Since I like legal thrillers I read "Tenth Justice" and didn't much care for it -- actually, that was a pretty poor book -- but the EW review spurred me to try again. Won't get fooled again. Unrealistic, dopey, and written with all the verve of a legal textbook. You want a legal thriller, pick up "Street Lawyer." This one's not worth the twenty five bucks.
Rating:
Summary: Predictable, badly written, annoying
Review: The high-concept premise here is so contrived it's irritating: the husband's told if he loses his wife will be killed, and the wife's told if SHE loses her husband will be killed . . . um, okay, but how believable is it that neither would tell the other, really? Okay, getting beyond that, there's every cornball cliche in the book here. The novel teems with improbability, the characterization is flat, and the prose is substandard. John Grisham's no literary giant, but at least he knows how to tell a story convincingly. Pass.
Rating: 
Summary: Never put it down
Review: How did this guy learn to write so well? I took this book on vacation and ended up with a bad sunburn because I could not put it down! I loved The Tenth Justice, but this book was even better. The characters were well developed, the plot was fast-paced, and the twists caught me well off guard. A GREAT BEACH BOOK! I can't wait until he writes another.
Rating:
Summary: A Read It All In One Day Thriller!
Review: Brad Meltzer's newest thriller, Dead Even, provides entertainment equal to his first,The Tenth Justice. Meltzer does an admirable job of weaving in plot and friendship betrayals,keeping the reader guessing. The relationship between ADA Sara Tate and her ladder-climbing husband, Jared Lynch, provides good tension, but its outcome was fairly predictable. The fast paced," made for movie approach", in both of his novels will ensure Meltzer's success.
Rating:
Summary: Great thriller - semi-realistic too!
Review: Better than the Tenth Justice, which I really liked, this book was a great summer read - just don't get so caught up in seeing how it all turns out that you end up the same color as the cover... Only one thing struck me as inacurate - NO 7th or 8th year associate at a New York firm large enough to have a gym on an upper floor would EVER first-seat 7 cases. Maybe a partner, in his 7th year of partnership, would have such a record..... Otherwise, and despite, I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Headed straight for the top!
Review: Brad Meltzer's 2nd novel "Dead Even" reads like a French Bullet Train going down hill on greased rails. Fast as lightning, with more twist and turns than a roller coaster!Rarley are we treated to a second novel that unequivably out paces even the first excellent work. With characters that come to life with a driving force, and snap, crackle and pop all the way up to the final scene. And what a nail-biter of a final scene! I predict this will be the most popular hardcover on the beach this summer. If John Grisholm had any dignity at all, he would step aside and let this this new powerhouse writer take over the "legal thriller" genre completely. As I approached the end of this book with the chagrin that only such a novel can produce, I was extremely happy to find the rather broad opening for a sequel, or 2 or 3 featuring these new characters. My only critisim is very minor, and has nothing to do with the book itself, but I like to see an explanation and history of the font used at the end of a book.
Rating:
Summary: SLOW START BUT THEN WATCH OUT!!!!
Review: WOW!!!! what a great second book....literary rollercoaster after slow start!!!!! loved the characters....yeah, this is fiction so you can kill off a couple of characters here and there...but what's literary license for if you don't use it...eh? brad meltzer writes easy-to-read stuff...fun to learn the behind the scenes in the d.a.'s office and another winner destined to top the charts fast!!!! thanx, brad, have you quit your day job yet????? gotta keep churning them out fast!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Shows promise...
Review: Brad Meltzner weaves a fairly entertaining yarn -- and writes well enough to keep you interested as the story twists this way and that.
Novelists and screenwriters play upon their audience's "suspention of disbelief" to get them to buy into the fictional worlds they create. At its best, the audience identifies with a character whose only real existence is on paper and ink. We cheer the author's heros, we boo the major and minor villans.
Credible fiction is a tough business -- and in all fairness, Meltzer does a halfway decent job. Where the novel fails as fiction is where it attempts to inject violence and drama into the story. I still have trouble believing that an attorney who is physically assaulted by his own client -- repeatedly -- could still hold the kind of dialogue he had with him. Clearly, the author was much better at offering credible dialogue of the main characters' strained marriage -- and between the ADA and her quirky legal assistant. Simply killing characters does not by themselves make a story dramatic. Doing so in a cavalier fashion with little explaination of the whys kill the story.
Meltzer has an entertaining and engaging voice, and I hope he has a better time with his next novel.
Rating:
Summary: Blows away The Tenth Justice!
Review: Although there were glimpses of brilliance in The Tenth Justice, I agreed with many of the reviewers that it was written almost as a "Grisham wannabe" for the Generation X-ers. I was able to get a copy of his latest prior to publication, and all I can say is...WOW!!! What a great book. Meltzer shows a great deal more maturity and style in this new thriller. Many predicted superstardom when "Justice" was released. After the reading public devours this one, he will surely get the critical and popular acclaim that he now deserves.
Rating: 
Summary: Eminently skippable
Review: Where do all these rave "reviews" come from -- honestly? Most of these exuberant reader-reviews appeared here even before the books were in the stores! Which leads me to suspect that these "reviews" were actually engineered by the book's publisher -- which, if true, is a real abuse of the great Amazon "people's review" system. The characters are paper-thin, unbelievable, and implausible (brand names don't make characterization), the central plot-gimmick is woefully contrived, there are dumb coincidences and plot twists that make you scratch your head and lose any faith in the writer, and the writing is pretty mediocre. (To the reader-reviewer who asks "Where did this guy learn to write?" I say, the Berlitz English-as-a-Foreign-Language School). And as a lawyer I can tell you there are so many improbabilities and bone-headed misunderstandings of how the law works in reality that I can only conclude the author may have gone to law school but he clearly never practiced real law. There are so many good legal-thriller authors around -- John Lescroart, Philip Friedman, Steve Martini, even the Godzilla of them all, Grisham -- who I'd suggest you read before you plunk down the money for this dreck. I've read worse, certainly, but not between hard covers.
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