I had the same issue when running the exercise files from Scott Allen's great Pluralsight course about MVC4 fundamentals. Updating Newtonsoft.Json with the prerelease switch didn't work for me. You have to reinstall the WebApi packages. Use the following commands in the package manager console:
uninstall-package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi
uninstall-package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.webhost
uninstall-package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.core
uninstall-package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client
uninstall-package Newtonsoft.Json
install-package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi
I thought first, that uninstalling Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi would also take care of uninstalling webhost, core and client - but this didn't work. Reinstalling Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi then provides for the correct version of Newtonsoft.Json as a dependent assembly, though.
After that it worked perfectly.
Hope this helps.