This novel places the hard-boiled ethos, an outlook bred in cities, into a rural area. Of the Scarpetta novels, this one bears the closest connections with Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled masterpiece The Big Sleep (1939). Chandler is justly renowned for his colorful and evocative metaphors and images, and for the weary tone of the narration. In both of these stylistic aspects, The Big Sleep and The Body Farm offer rich comparisons for reading and discussion.

Other contemporary mystery writers have used settings very similar to Black Mountain, rural communities with small police forces unused to violence and needful of help from outsiders to deal with the visitations of crime. North Carolina-born Sharyn McCrumb uses such a place in her Macavity Award winning If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990). Stuart Woods's celebrated Chiefs (1981) depicts the search for a serial killer across five decades in the history of a Southern...